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?"

Comments

Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[BitterOak]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[vlm]

The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.

http://perl6.org/compilers/features

Its kind of like that Arthur Clarke story "The Nine Billion Names of God". If, one night, you glance at the sky and see the stars start going out, you'll know that someone has finally implemented all the Perl6 features. Either that, or its cloudy and going to rain.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[Surazal]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[vlm]

became moored in WIP status for the last 6-x years.

12 years, not 6.

The killer is no one in the perl dev community wants it. This says it all "Backward compatibility with earlier versions of Perl is not a goal". The problem is I don't love perl because of its syntax, although some of it is pretty cool, I love it because of the CPAN which does all my work for me. All my problems seem to be solved by combining at most ten or so CPAN modules. Its kind of like how the whole world is built out of only a hundred or so elements... if I wrote a perl program that used 100 CPAN modules, the result would be a new universe would spring into being, like the big bang. Or something like that.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[chromatic]

... part of the problem I think is that perl 6 is not ANYTHING like perl 5.

The parts of Perl 6 I like are a lot like Perl 5, and the parts I really like are much better than Perl 5.

... 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.

I like Perl 6 grammars far, far more than I like Perl 5 regex. That's one of the best parts of Perl 6. Regex as borrowed from Unix and enhanced over the years have accumulated a lot of mutually incomprehensible cruft. Perl 6 cleans that up.

The problem with Perl 6, of course, is that no implementation is anywhere close to practically useful. Almost twelve years after the Perl 6 announcement, there's still no reason to hold your breath.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[chromatic]

If that scares you, cover your eyes: there are more than two compilers.

... it looks like Parrot was dropped.

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.

Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6?

[zmughal]

As far as the matching capabilities of Perl 6, I think they're trying to do something that will advance the state-of-the-art in terms of programming langauge integration in the same way that Perl 5's regex did. The Perl 6 rules are similar to the tricks and hacks that people do with regular expressions to build up full grammars. By separating out the parts into logical components, you will get better readability and reusability. Not only will we get cleaner text processing, but this (along with the VM architecture) will aid the development of DSLs that will extend the language into an exciting future.

Yeah, it's some good Kool-Aid and the Perl community been waiting for a while, but bringing these ideas into a production-ready language isn't trivial. I'm still using Perl 5 because of CPAN, but I feel that Perl 6 will eventually get to the same level especially with a source-to-source compiler. The hardest part would be dealing with native-code bindings.

Modern Perl book

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:No

[X.25]

Perl is not coming back. Get over it and learn something else.

It never went anywhere, so why would it need to come back?

Re:Hard to get started

[chromatic]

Can some /.er point me down the path toward modern Perl learning?

I have a bias, but I've had many positive responses to Modern Perl: The Book.

Re:No

[h4rr4r]

Coming back?

It never left, I used it everyday.

Parallax

[hessian]

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.

Perl's strength

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:Perl renaissance?

[kwoff]

Have you maintained any (large) body of code that isn't a nightmare?

Bunch of stuck up nannies

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:There will be no Perl renaissance

[Sez Zero]

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.