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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?"
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
PERL spend many a night modifying my Everyauction script/site.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
The Renaissance was characterized by lots of people learning and contributing to a wide variety of ideas, skills, sciences, and arts.
Perl is one language that does things on one kind of device.
Perl is not coming back. Get over it and learn something else.
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.
Web development has changed so much that unfortunately you can't get started the way you could back in, say, 1999. I know because I tried it. Tried to go from PHP to Perl and kept running into 1) old Perl stuff with amazing documentation and tutorials and book and 2) new Perl stuff with a confusing mess of advice, opinions, and non-support from framework users. I was really looking forward to learning Perl, but for now I'm sort of stuck with PHP and CodeIgniter due to lots of current documentation and a very generous community.
/.er point me down the path toward modern Perl learning? Tried Mojolicious and Dancer and had to bow out; much too complex for me at this point. As I recall, the Dancer blog example was set up in such a way (using hashes, or something like that) that it was hard for a beginner to understand and extend.
Can some
I'm also currently using a bit of Python and C, but deploying Python web apps is a gigantic pain in the mess.
If my co-workers are anything to go by, absolutely anything starting with some equivalent of "#!/usr/bin/perl" or that contains the line "use strict;" is ultra-scary double-plus-ungood hate hate hate.
Which is why I'll be employed here as long as I want, since I'm one of the few people who'll do dirty parsing work, and my weapon of choice is Perl. Heh.
But, unfortunately, no, Perl won't pick back up soon. Shame. I sort of like the esoteric chaos of the language.
Renaissance? Please don't tell us that PERL has been "born again". It's not stupid enough for that...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Perl never went anywhere. Sure, it may not be today's new hip fad language, but it's widely used and supported.
.. for prototyping and scripting. I'm a non-coder working for a software house with highly experienced coders. I taught myself Perl and C. But none of these guys will use Perl. For anything. All they will use for scripting and prototyping is *Python*. They make the usual cliche jokes about Perl being unreadable etc. I'm really beginning to think that I wasted my time learning Perl.
Everyone who switched from Perl to Ruby found out that Rubyist's (OK, Rails-ists really) are arseholes and are now returning to Perl.
We're seeing Perl as having moved because we have moved. Perl has kept doing what it has always done at a high level of excellence.
The market shifted. First, many Perl programmers shifted to PHP once the net decided security and economy of processing power were not goals on the table. Second, a lot of newer programmers are reliant on frameworks and other pre-built systems and learned the languages that go with those.
However, among those who've just kept making things work for the past 15 years, Perl remains alive and well. It is still the fastest way to get the widest range of tasks done. And if you don't code like an obscurantist maniac, it's easy to maintain.
It may look to us like Perl went away, but what really happened was an infusion of other people and trends. Now that the free money from a dot-com booming economy has gone away, Perl is shining through once again as the reliable and powerful option that it is.
Futurist Traditionalism
Boy, a sweet five-16th birthday! Happy congratulations, Perl!
So what to get a language for their 5.16th? A new Car-p? Or maybe an actual car from Dad's dealership?
Perl's strength is that it's expressive. It's not a language which is easy to learn or which generates heavily optimized code.
In the demo phase, you're not really worried about performance. The goal is to have something showing as quickly as possible, and not worry too much about how fast it runs, or how much memory it takes. Overspec your demo system for the time being (ie - make it really fast and install lots of memory), and once you have a reasonable interface go back and recode it in a simpler language which can be more easily optimized.
Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example) are generally not very expressive. You end up wasting tons of time debugging issues of memory allocation, library interface details, and datatype conversion.
Languages which are expressive are a little harder to learn, but any individual line in the expressive language does a lot more. Since you are writing fewer lines, and since the fewer lines do more, you end up making programs more easily and in less time.
Yes, the programs will execute a little slower, but as mentioned, this is not important in the demo stage. Your productivity will be much higher.
And there are lots of places where performance simply doesn't matter. Scripts usually fall into this category.
Perl was written by a linguist, not an engineer. As such, it's harder to learn (it's got tons more keywords and context), but once you get the hang of it it's much more expressive. The following single line:
@Lines = sort { $a->{Name} cmp $b->{Name} } @Lines;
unfolds into several lines of C++, plus a subroutine definition with datatype definitions. The following line:
@Files = <c:/Windows/*.exe>;
can be implemented using one of over a dozen possible library calls in C++, but is builtin in perl. You don't have to look up the library call interface specific to your system.
I hope not. I have to maintain a large body of Perl code at work, and it's a nightmare.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Ultimate glue? That's why I'm interested in Perl 6. It's supposed to be able call C/C++ library functions directly. No more need for wrapper libraries, which is the majority of CPAN. No need for SWIG, which I find bloated.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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. Perl's mindshare has plummeted in the last 10 years or so, and it's only going to get worse as all the new CS grads are much more interested in functional languages, e.g. Haskell; to these people Perl seems like an example of terrible language design. Perl more and more appears to be used mostly by some old neckbeard diehards who haven't kept up with recent developments in programming.
So yeah, of course some people are still using Perl, just as some people are still using Tcl. But overall you can stick a fork in it; Perl's dead.
If they write their own code, its unreadable?
Fire them.
Its easy to write code in perl that looks like C and is readable, and still fast. (Often faster than java btw)
Yes, using shortcuts and lots of login in one line is cute, but its horrible to read, so DONT do it.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I love Perl. For quick tasks, utilities, parsers, code generators..etc have no idea what I would do without it. Actually I know I would be wasting much more of my employers time writing this shit in a different language and most likely would just choose to do a lot more shit work manually with increased chance of errors and less automation.
I get to get away with taking shortcuts that would not be advisable in a large project for pennies on the dollar. As much as I love Perl I'm not sure I would trust myself enough to use it in a huge project unless I forced myself not to use certain features.
Check out what lack of religion did to the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, and others.
I can think of over 106,000 reasons to use Perl (and by the way, CPAN is still seeing very large numbers of both contributions and contributors).
I used to hack a lot of perl4 then perl5. Then someone invented Ruby. RIP perl.
Perl6 looks similarly cool -- maybe my descendants can hack it someday.
Many of us like Perl. We all know how faddish the industry is about languages and tools. Remember the Rails hype. And how Python suddenly was "cool". Ok so nobody cares anymore if Perl6 surfaces or not and certainly no-one wants to learn a whole set of new Perl syntax (Perl5 is hard enough for most it seems, although I never found elementary Perl all that hard - there are so many snippet examples around).
What Perl needs is re-hyping so that all our pimply-faced younger brethren entering the industry, most of whom have probably never played with Perl, decide that Perl is uber cool, rock solid, add hyperbole here. Maybe big-bucks development competitions pitting a skilled Python team against a skilled Perl team for example? A PR campaign directed at coder websites, Slashdot etc. Something like that?
I've been using Perl on small and big projects [both my own and commercial] since about 1994 and am very aware of its defects, terse and sometimes confusing syntax, especially 'things that work but somewhat unexpectedly', weak typing unless you add module magic etc. etc.
However, it has always felt incredibly intuitive and efficient, because, I suspect, that a linguistics person rather than a hard-IT construct-elegance person is behind its design. That and the fact that you can find a library for anything you want on CPAN, a good thing and a bad thing means that it remains my language of choice.
Natural languages are messy but expressive, intuitive and efficient, with a downside of [for example] some ambiguity, there's no reason not to try this a programming language. As I said in another post, I'm not sure I'd use Perl for avionics though.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
From the link:
From the link:
Sounds like a HUGE amount of development! I had no idea of the scale of the effort and love and use Perl myself.
Hard to imagine how anyone intelligent could ever say Perl is not timely with this kind of mass coordination going on. (Not to mention Slashdot being written in Perl IIRC...)
Personally I am excited about the Modern Perl book (I seem to have self-censored myself into using older versions).
I have used and liked Catalyst but have also imagined even easier ways to build systems with it and say Moose.
So I am going to have a lot of fun trying out Dancer and PSGI/Plack.
So how do Perl lovers (I'm one but an amateur) pitch using Perl to the unbelievers? How to defeat all the cliches about Perl and the Python dinky toy fanboys? How to convince management (who know less than an amateur anyway)?
I, for one, want Perl to fight back and win. I enjoy writing Perl and wouldn't mind turning it into an income stream sometime. I also think I don't need to be 13yo and have an IQ of 190 to write useful Perl, it works well for us older guys.
...jokes about perl being unreadable are childish and I usually tell such people to learn perl or shut up, because basing your knowledge on perl 4, one-liners for CLI & obfuscated perl contests does not give very professional image of their programming knowledge.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.