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Perl 5.16.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "Perl 5.16.0 is now available with plenty of improvements all around. You can view a summary and all the change details here. With Perl on an annual release schedule, and projects like Mojolicious, Dancer, perlbrew, Plack, and Moose continuing to gain in popularity, are we in the middle of a Perl renaissance?"
Perl 6 is quite a departure, with many breaking changes from 5. People had code written in 5, and 6 became moored in WIP status for the last 6-x years.
Chromatic's Modern Perl book is also available as a free download. It's useful for Perl programmers who want to know what's new in the Perl world in the last several years.
I love Perl, but I'm curious. Whatever happened to Perl 6? I remember hearing about it way back when I was in grad school, which was a long time ago.
Perl 6 isn't dead, per se. A quick google search shows that there are a few implementations running around, although none are even close to production-ready yet. Here's the Perl 6 portal, in case you were wondering.
I did run and download one of the more complete implementations, and part of the problem I think is that perl 6 is not ANYTHING like perl 5. The reason I use perl at all, and the only reason I still use perl 5 TO THIS DAY is the regex capabilities. They completely ripped that out of perl 6 and re-implemented it to make it more user-friendly, and they did so poorly, IMHO. Instead of calling htis perl 6, they should have named it something completely different. Call it "perl" does a disservice to what made perl so powerful in the first place.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
I have a bias, but I've had many positive responses to Modern Perl: The Book.
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Coming back?
It never left, I used it everyday.
If that scares you, cover your eyes: there are more than two compilers.
Not exactly. The Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) people want to write a VM independence layer and port that to multiple VM backends.
Don't ask me to explain that.
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Perl was written by a linguist, not an engineer.
And that engineer loved Latin, not Esperanto.
The following single line:
@Lines = sort { $a->{Name} cmp $b->{Name} } @Lines;
In Python is:
lines.sort(key=lambda o: o.name) # for inline sorting, or
lines = sorted(lines, key=lambda o: o.name) # mimicking the perl idiom
@Files = <c:/Windows/*.exe>;
In Python is:
from glob import glob
files = glob("c:/Windows/*.exe")
In other words, Python is just like Perl, only it is readable and makes sense.
Sorry, Perl fanboys, but Perl is dead. Not only has it been eclipsed in the web domain by PHP, J2EE, ASP.Net, Ruby on Rails, and others, but in the scripting domain it has been overtaken by Python.
TIOBE Index seems to disagree: Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby all down.
Perl right there at 9, same as it ever was: a good tool for people that want to get work done and not chase the hot flavor of the month.