The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership

Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."

Re:Bring back Larry!

[CyricZ]

It's not an issue whether we all want Larry to take over Perl again. It's more a matter of whether or not he wishes to resume such leadership. And judging by his past statements, he is not interested in that. He wants Perl 6 to be a community effort, as it has been.

As it says on the Perl 6 home page [perl.org]:
"Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community." - Larry Wall, State of the Onion speech, TPC4

Perl's place in todays world?

[rockinrobotix]

Other than for products (or news aggregating websites) that were originally coded in Perl is there any reason to start a project today in Perl instead of any of the more modern scripting languages?
This is not a rhetorical question (or in Slashdot: I am not trolling). I would actually like to know why developers would choose Perl over alternatives today on a new project.

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[Anonymous Coward]

CPAN.

CPAN is the silver bullet. While I prefer other scripting languages (heck, almost *any* scripting language) over Perl, no one comes close to having the sheer amount of instantly-useful code available as Perl boasts with the CPAN. Sure, there's some crap in there, but the wheat outshines the chaff by a wide margin.

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[photon317]

To you and your like minded responders: from the point of view of someone who stays current with perl, your question certainly seems like a troll.

Perl continues to be a one of the most advanced languages in existance (slashdot jokes about how horribly bad one can shoot oneself in the foot with it notwithstanding). There is every reason to start a new project in Perl today. I'm really not even going to try to run down a list of reasons why here, they're just too numerous. If you haven't given serious professional development in Perl a shot, you're missing out. Perl really doesn't have any equals. Python comes close to being an alternative to Perl where the rules are more strictly enforced (which removes a lot of interesting possibilities), whitespace matters syntactically (and that's just insane in a modern language), and the majority of CPAN is missing.

Take any paradigm, and method or way of developing, and unique and interesting feature of some other language, and it all can, will, and probably has been done in Perl. It is on some ways the ultimate metalanguage. You want OO? You have your choice of a wide array of completely different styles of OO (both in terms of internals and interfaces), whatever suits your needs. Are you a fan of functional programming ala Haskell? Try Language::Functional ( http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Language-Function al-0.03/Functional.pm [cpan.org] ). TheDamian even wrote a module that allows one to write perl code as correct sentences and paragraphs in proper Latin, even given Latin's lack of defined rules about word ordering. (see: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perl igata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm [cpan.org] for the module, and http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/ Perligata.html [monash.edu.au] for the academic explanation)

Perl 6 + Parrot I suspect will be even stronger than Perl 5, but only time will tell. Perl 5 will of course be around virtually forever, even with what deficiencies it has.

BTW, there is recently a great new Perl book out called "Perl Best Practices", which goes about the business of telling you how to not write spaghetti unmaintainable broken perl code (of course, they way you do that isn't much different than how you do it in any other language, which just goes to show that the problem isn't neccesarily that Perl invites good programmers to program badly - the problem is that perl is so accessible and easy that it invites bad programmers to program at all).

Re:There will always be a place for Perl.

[Lost+Found]

On the contrary, the absolutely huge market share Perl has, combined with the 8,000+ modules available freely on CPAN, combined with the fact that well made Perl applications can readily outperform those in any other comparable language, means it's going to be around for a long time. And on the Perl6 subject, when Perl6 is available, it's going to blow the doors off of everyone else for a long time.

what perl's features are now standard?

[SolitaryMan]

What were once great benefits of Perl have become standard features in many other languages.

If you were talking about Python or Ruby, I could've agreed. But Java, C#, PHP are *DAMN FAR BEHIND* in this respect. I mean, metadata manipulation, built in hash and list data types with appropriate manipulation functions (grep, map etc.) are still "too advanced" features for modern programming languages like C# and Java.

Re:Catch-up

[chromatic]

Java, and C# (especially C#), however are truely on the cutting edge...

The cutting edge of what, the best technologies the '70s had to offer?

It's not clear that you understand CPS, continuations, coroutines, properties, language-supported roles, optional type inferencing and strictness, junctions, hyperoperators, rules, grammars, or closure-based control structures. I don't expect to see Java add any of those features in the next ten years. The CLR might add a few in the next five years.

Have you ever programmed in a language outside of the Algol family tree?

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[King Babar]

This suggests an obvious question: what's wrong with Perl? Well, there's plenty wrong with Perl that I can point out, but interestingly, I've discovered that the complaints which Perl experts have are radically different from the complaints that casual Perl users have (amusingly, many folks who criticize Perl couldn't tell simple Perl and PHP snippets apart).

What you say is true, but misses a major, major point. Perl right now has a pretty horrible reputation in some quarters, and even though it might be the result of kvetching from a lot of uninformed people, pointing this out is not a solution to the problem. More than a couple of political campaigns have gone down in flames when candidates made no useful response to baseless negative campaigning. Right now, I'm finally getting more excited by Perl6 now that there looks like there will be one, but we're still realistically looking at January 2007 for that, which is about seven years after the effort started.

Given the comment at the very end of your post about Ruby, you realize the kind of mortal peril that Perl finds itself in. If Matz had not been Japanese, and therefore more of the Ruby docs had been available in English maybe 3 years earlier, Perl could have ended up stone cold dead. What the new leadership has got to keep in mind is very simple: if we don't finish Perl6 *right now*, we're all going to die. This was not the only way to have done things, but so much has been invested in Perl6 for so long that there is really no way to make Perl5 better in ways that will convince people that it isn't last year's language. If only a bit more thought had gone into Perl5 these last five years or so, we'd be in better shape right now.

But I have one more point to make, while I'm on the soap box:

People complain about Perl's "line noise" characteristics and unmaintainable programs and ignore that much of this stems from heavy regular expression use (yell at regexes, not Perl) and people without a strong programming background finding the language easy to use (yell at those people, not at their tool).

That's not completely true. Like it or not, every Perl variable name has a piece of line noise attached to it that 90% of the time clarifies nothing. For that matter, there is the madness surrounding lexical variables in Perl. Using them is good programming practice, but every declaration of such a thing adds another "my" to the list. It would have been SO EASY to define a flag or a pragma noting that all of the declarations in a file were implicitly of "my" variables, but this never happened. And then there is the fiasco of function argument declarations. As in: Perl, unique among all other scripting languages doesn't yet have useful parameter lists in function definitions Every time I type somehing like my ($foo, bar, $baz) = @_; I think to myself "lame lame lame". Sure, Perl6 solves this one quite handily, and gives eleventy-seven different ways to call and declare function parameters, but Yeesh! Did we really have to wait for the One Great Perl to arrive to get something that sucks less than Javascript 1.0 in this respect?

I have been a Perl programmer for 14 years now, and I think the world of what it can do. But I am telling you this: if we don't fix Perl, we will die. The seven lean years will kill us unless we make it completely obvious to people how superior Perl6 is, and unless we make sure that it really is out there to hack with. If betas of Perl 6 don't arrive before the middle of 2006, I swear we are doomed. Please do everything in your power to make sure this doen't happen.

Thanks for listening. :-)

Re:The next wave of innovation.

[A beautiful mind]

"Perl was the innovator. And Perl even managed to popularize regular expressions. But these days others have taken over the task of innovation in that field."

I thought that it's not necessary to make my point stronger, but it seems so.

Disclaimer: I've seen you posting a couple of times intelligent stuff, i believe this is one of the few mind barfs everyone has when you posted about Perl having worse regexp than the others listed.

You talk way too generalized, about languages and not in exact, specific things when you're talking about regular expression support in those languages. Mind you, Perl is practically built around regular expressions. 'perldoc perlre' and 'perldoc perlop' should give you a slight idea how it looks like. While maybe C# has regular expression support like for example, sed or even my favorite text editor, vim does, it's nowhere near Perl's support for regular expressions. In Perl, you can use regular expressions almost everywhere, taking full advantages of the Perl additions. Ever wondered why people actively using regular expressions talk about the sed style and Perl style regular expressions? Because Perl added a lot of new/good stuff, mostly which is not duplicated fully elsewhere. In C#, support for regular expressions is nowhere near to Perl. About Python - I've got marginal experience, so i'd rather not judge it, but Ruby isn't built around regular expressions either. Sorry, Perl still is the most regular expression capable language around.

If you have already taken a look at Perl 6, then you might have seen that the regular expressions are almost completely taken to a new level there, so I'd rather say that Perl will stay _the_ top regular expression language for a while...

Mods 5 Interesting?

[truckaxle]

The regular expression support of languages like Python, Ruby, and even C# trump that of Perl. And what do you base this comment on - which is stated as fact with no supporting reference or valid points.

Language post! Bring on the FUD!

[Kirby]

Of course, any time a slashdot article talks about a programming language, there's a concerted effort by the language's detractors to say things like, "Does any one still use Perl?" "C++, isn't that a dead language with C# and Java taking its place?" "Java's just marketing hype, and C# doubly so, nothing beats C." and so on forever.

But of course we do this. As programmers, winning the language evangelism wars is one of the few things that really matters. And by matters, I mean it affects how much money I make.

I'm a good Perl programmer. I'm a novice at several other languages. I could pick them up, but it'll take years before I'm as proficient in anything else as I am in Perl. The same is true for most programmers after they pass the five year mark or so.

So, if the VP of an up and coming company chooses Java, I'm very unlikely to work there. If they choose Perl, I might. And it increases demand for Perl programmers. It's nothing but good for me if there's more options available when the day comes for me to change employers. And so, I have a vested interest in people believing Perl is faster to develop in and easier to maintain than Java or C#.

And so, don't believe me. And don't believe anyone else either who is detracting. It's in their interest to see people start projects in their language of choice. There's very little impartiality here.

Instead, ask yourself: does this language do the job? Is the development time acceptable? Is the performance acceptable?

I think Perl is very hard to beat on development time, and very few people need the performance of C or assembly - but I've just told you that I have invested a lot of time in becoming an experienced Perl programmer, so I want you to believe Perl is the tool to use. I don't think I've attached myself to a bad language, and I think it'll really win a fair fight quite often, but the court of public opinion (especially Slashdot Comments) is just such a terrible place to form technical opinions.

Re:There will always be a place for Perl.

[LLuthor]

The regular expression support of languages like Python, Ruby, and even C# trump that of Perl.

In what way can the regular expression capabilities of any of these languages even approach that of Perl?

Please put down your crack-pipe and have a look at the perlre man-page and the CPAN archives.

Perl can't see the syntax for the trees

[SimHacker]

The meaning of a program should be clear and unambiguous to the reader, and not require you to do a lot of pattern matching and apply a bunch of rules and heuristics to understand what it means. Most copies of the K&R C manual fall open to the same page: the table of operator precedence. That shows that the skyscraper of precedence rules was a mistake in the design of the language, but Perl takes that idea and runs with it, in many different directions!

That example of how Perl 6 is fucked is that "print (1+2)+3" will not be the same as "print(1+2) + 3". That's MUCH more confusing and unexpected than Python or almost any other language! The white space that Python requires simply makes the program clearer and easier to read, but Perl's astonishingly arbitrary parsing heuristics make it extremely difficult to understand, and horribly easy to make dreadful mistakes.

Yet you leap to defend Perl 6's bizarre and unexpected interpretation of white space as if it were a benefit??! With a spin like that, you should apply for Scott McClellan's job. Are you just one of those slackers who loves Perl because of its deep flaws, due to the job security it gives you? That's a BAD long term plan.

PS: In case you're like one of the people working on Parrot who take jokes much too seriously and can't detect sarcasm, my previous message about C++ Generalized White Space Overloading was a joke, and the publication date of that Generalized Overloading for C++2000 proposal (which was really written by Bjarne Stroustrup), was April 1.

-Don