Perl 5.16.0 Released 192
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?"
Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:5, Interesting)
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That is a very good question!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6
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Make no mistake, despite those who'd predict an "Epoch fail", Perl 6 is the future - and it always will be.
The fate of Perl 6 is tied to that of IPv6. Widespread adoption of each is expected at the same rough timeframe.
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Who said anything about dagos and cathedrals? That's a bazaar inference!
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Who said anything about dagos and cathedrals? That's a bazaar inference!
Well played Sir, well played indeed!
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Nooooooo.... [wikipedia.org]
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Oh, BTW: Hey, Perloids! Thanks for the unecessary version precision! I had a whole surplus of ".0"'s hanging around, clogging the undersides of my keyboard. Now I can disperse them, almost at will in referencing this release. :-)
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The ACTUAL version is correctly displayed 5.16.
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The same thing that will happen to Windows 8.
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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.
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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have a look at Apache camel : http://camel.apache.org/enterprise-integration-patterns.html [apache.org]
I have the feeling that it is the kind of problems you have to solve...
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"Backward compatibility with earlier versions of Perl is not a goal".
Have listen to the FLOSS Weekly interview with the fellow working on Rakudo. They do intend to get perl5 modules running.
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Perl is slower than Javascript for many things- 30 to 100 times slower:
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=v8&lang2=perl [debian.org]
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Yes and what I said was:
Yeah what I'd actually want is for someone to do to Perl 5 what Google did with Javascript: make it run much faster.
Not run faster than early javascript engines. Try to keep up please.
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The first sentence would have more credibility if you had some evidence or if it wasn't stated so categorically as to be obviously false. I'm in the perl developer community, and I do want perl 6 -- I'm just not holding my breath for it to be usable very soon for real-world projects.
The second sentence seems to be quoted from the WP article, but you made it misleadin
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Check out what lack of religion did to the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, and others.
No doubt totalitarian socialism had nothing to do with their outcomes, though.
(an all-powerful State can't tolerate any parallel power structures, such as a Church)
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But Marxist Socialism is caused by the very same doctrine that today is advanced by Richard Dawkins.
Let's assume that's correct. Dawkins is an atheist and he promotes violence to achieve his social ends (socialism). I don't know if that's true, but it doesn't matter.
There are many non-theists who advocate and live by the non-aggression principle, Satyagraha, or Jesus's non-violent teachings. So you can make a 2x2 matrix of theists/atheists (x,y) and people who do/don't (m,n) support violence as their me
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First, I didn't mean that Dawkins explicitly advocates violence; I merely say that his ideology, if it spreads, will eventually lead to great violence.
I agree that people who believe in Jesus should live by His teachings. And regarding state-sponsored violence, please check out www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ratzinger2.html (Why the Church and state must be separate, by Pope Benedict XVI).
And just so you know where I am coming from, i am half-conservative and half-libertarian. I am pro-life, anti-war, pro-immigr
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Troll!?
Mods, have some honesty please!
"Troll" is not a substitute for "I disagree".
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TL;DR: Dawkins killed 100 million! (Hey, if you can misread posts, so can I!)
You deliberately misread what I said. This suggest you have no argument and decided to resort to fallacies.
Very few of those deaths have to do with anti-religious intorlerance and none with materialism. Marxist socialism doesn't imply totalitarian socialism.
What? Have you ever studied Marxism? Marxism explicitly advocates class hatred, violent revolutions and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Please at least attempt to argue rationally.
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Flamebait?! I was responding to the signature of the grandparent! Do moderators know any impartiality?
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Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2865083&cid=40075109 [slashdot.org]
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I explained myself in http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2865083&cid=40075109 [slashdot.org]
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.
http://perl6.org/compilers/features [perl6.org]
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.
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This scares me. The fact that there are two compilers (which sows confusion) and none is feature complete... and it looks like Parrot was dropped.
This is beginning to look like the HURD. A lot of thrashing around for cool features, nothing ever released.
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:4, Informative)
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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and it looks like Parrot was dropped.
Nah, he's only resting...
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This scares me. The fact that there are two compilers (which sows confusion) and none is feature complete
Why is that so scary or "confusing"? There are a lot of compilers for C and C++ out there, and they aren't all "Feature complete" (MSFT's C++ compiler for example is not fully C99 compliant and they don't seem in much of a hurry to make it so). Doesn't seem to me to indicate that a language or platform should be discounted.
... and it looks like Parrot was dropped.
Can you give a citation showing this? A new release of Parrot came out just last week [parrot.org]. It looks far from dropped--in fact it looks like a VERY actvie development community--they see
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The problem with trying to do absolutely everything is it takes awhile to implement.
http://perl6.org/compilers/features [perl6.org]
That list shows "Rakudo" having most of the features in place already...
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And with only 12 years of development in, they've only got maybe another 10 to go. Excellent.
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [perl6.org], 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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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Almost twelve years after the Perl 6 announcement, there's still no reason to hold your breath.
The real reason why Perl6 hasn't been completed ready for production is that some aspects are dependent on (some of) those same people who are holding their breath.
Re:Whatever happened to Perl 6? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] are similar to the tricks [p3rl.org] and hacks [p3rl.org] 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.
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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.
It's also one of the more functional feature sets already. Very useful if speed is not your priority.
For people that actually enjoy learning new things rather than endlessly traversing the March of Progress [dipert.org], following Perl6 development is very refreshing.
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forget perl 6, what happened to perl 8, 9. 10... they should by at least at version 42 by now :)
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Ahhh (Score:1)
PERL spend many a night modifying my Everyauction script/site.
Modern Perl book (Score:4, Informative)
Chromatic's Modern Perl book [onyxneon.com] 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.
Like Perl, but Python dominates (Score:2, Insightful)
.. 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.
Re:Like Perl, but Python dominates (Score:4, Insightful)
All they will use for scripting and prototyping is *Python*.
NOT using Perl for prototyping IME is a good thing.
Many of my program and libraries begin their life as proof-of-concept in Perl. And the problem is that from Perl implementation it is pretty much never possible to devise how much time it would take to implement C/C++/etc equivalent.
I had totally bad cases like where I have spent 2 weeks writing a library in C++ for which Perl's equivalent took me only 30 minutes. As a proof-of-concept, Perl implementation could be a quick hack - but C++ has to be a production quality. With the vast utility of Perl many corner cases seem trivial and work easily without performance regressions - while in C/C++ one ends up feeling like reimplementing the wheel for every one of them.
Perl is BAD for prototyping for C and C-like languages IMO. The difference between the languages and the libraries is way too great.
P.S. I'm not sure how better it is in Python. It should be better: the utility of the Python is much more limited compared to the Perl.
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Basically, most of any scripting language pretty much makes you throw out the codebase when you go to C. Exploring a concept to assess feasibility can work, but don't expect to not have to nearly start over, just with the benefit of knowing which algorithms/development paths just won't pan out.
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Exploring a concept to assess feasibility can work, but don't expect to not have to nearly start over, just with the benefit of knowing which algorithms/development paths just won't pan out.
My problem with Perl is precisely that: it is nearly impossible (or very time consuming) to implement conventional data structures like list or tree in Perl. One generally doesn't need them in Perl - but they pop up pretty often in C/C++/etc.
Now, when prototype is implemented using the Perl's arrays and hashes, they are orthogonal to data structures C++ code it going to use. Assignment of arrays and hashes (even during their mutation in loop) is optimized well in Perl - but in C++, it would end up being
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If you're writing in "C/C++" then you're either writing C, or terrible C++, so no wonder it is taking you so long.
Try using C++, or even C++11.
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Whether you wasted your time depends on whether you can use what you learned occasionally, or whether you had fun learning it. But anyway, learning anything is seldom a waste of time.
If your coders know several languages, and happen to not like Perl, that's OK. But if they know only a single language and really never use anything else, they are just not very competent and probably also quite boring.
Bunch of stuck up nannies (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, using shortcuts and lots of login in one line is cute, but its horrible to read, so DONT do it.
Once I met an absolute bastard in the Perl community, sneering at my code because every module was documented. The cheerful dogma "it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" still lingers. Gives you the same demoralising feeling as middle-managers stating that "If it's that easy to understand it must have been dead easy to develop."
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When I write quick scripts and prototypes I want things to work, and not discover at runtime that a typo in a variable name breaks.
That's why I love "perl -c" combined with "use strict" and have abandonned Python a long time ago.
Parallax (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Do you maintain the website linked as your home page? If so, what's it running under the hood [deathmetal.org]?
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And you? Are you a Google fanboy because your homepage is hosted at Blogger?
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As a matter of fact, I am.
I remember when I turned 5.16... (Score:2)
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 [perlauto.net]?
Perl's strength (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Well put. Except perhaps for the part about C++ being "easy" to learn. C++ is a fucking mess.
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I'm not disagreeing with this in any way, but an expressive language which does a lot in a single line of code by definition means that it's harder for humans to read. And readbility is (in my opinion) directly proportional to maintainability. This is, perh
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slashdot is written in perl
in todays i7's , perl runs as fast as P4.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/perl.php [debian.org]
Sure, a mandolbrot may be way faster in java, but real world solutions, are not 100% math, but a combination of data transforms, logic and db acesss or rest access, with disk io or net io.
And if most of your data is text, ie xml/json/csv, then perl can be as fast as java, but with less layers.
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In other words, Python is just like Perl, only Python fans are deluded into thinking the Python way of doing things is the only viable way.
Fixt.
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sorry, I tried many times to copy/past these so called python code, and then never work.
yes, relying on white space is a stupid idea.
Re:Perl's strength (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words, Python is just like Perl, only it is readable and makes sense.
Funny, I found the perl easier to read.
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I agree and unless there's something in CPAN pretty much already solving my problem (which happens a lot actually), I almost always choose python so I'm being honest unlike that person that somehow thinks the python makes more sense. I think that with perl, it depends how much shell scripting someone did first. Somehow a person needs to have experience with some syntax that's not like C/java/pascal and has reached the limits of shell scripts plus tools like sed and awk first before perl clicks or they can s
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Except that perl has an enormous amount of CPAN libraries that are often vast superior. Just take the perl interface to postgresql. No other language has such an perfect interface than perl.
Perl renaissance? (Score:3)
I hope not. I have to maintain a large body of Perl code at work, and it's a nightmare.
Re:Perl renaissance? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hope not. I have to maintain a large body of Perl code at work, and it's a nightmare.
Funny that. I've had quite similar nightmares with Java and PHP, which are supposed to be all that. My history with Java has really REALLY put me off that languaage (and now with Oracle on the litigation warpath I've resolved to avoid Java whever reasonably possible--I'd even wipe my Galaxy S2 of the Java-esque Android and put on boot2gecko if the latter was really ready for prime time). In the case of PHP I found it to be like a walk in the pasture--an easy hike to start but then you step in a pile of c
Perl is actually 'another' language (Score:2)
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
Awesome (Score:2)
From the link:
Awesome (2nd try) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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LOL apparently you've never seen the Perl6 feature list, which can be summarized to "implement every programming concept known to mankind", or the CPAN which is "everything that can be turned into (what amounts to) a library, turned into a library and ready to freely download".
Its the ultimate glue language.
calls C/C++ libraries (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Is Perl the "Ron Paul" of general purpose scripting languages?
*ducks*
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl is not coming back. Get over it and learn something else.
It never went anywhere, so why would it need to come back?
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I use Perl nearly every (damn) day, on a very old codebase project. There are things about Perl I like, but there are also things that I really despise. Not through fault of Perl, really -- it's simply old, slow (yes, slow) and outdated compared to other modern languages.
There is no way I would start a new project in Perl, and the only people who would are people who are willfully ignorant of the rest of the industry. Perl is beyond its life. There is nothing it does better than other languages, and there a
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The reason I like perl is that it is 'good enough' and the people that would screw with it to make it inconsistent are all off on either perl6 windmill chasing or other languages. I will admit to some unfortunate ignorance of ruby, but at least with python, while I find it a commendable language, they have been much more aggressive about incompatible changes than perl5. A program written against perl 5.4 runs fine with perl 5.16. However, in my experience code written against python 3.0 might not work qu
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I think the perl6 windmill is worth tilting at - at worst it makes the people jousting more knowledgeable about writing interpreters and virtual machines, and gives ideas to the general community that improve other existing languages. That includes Perl 5, I understand some of the features in Perl 6 made it in
Coming back? (Score:1)
Perl never went anywhere. Sure, it may not be today's new hip fad language, but it's widely used and supported.
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It is still used in new projects. IMO, Perl 6 being finished probably would kill the language. The reason perl5 is appealing is precisely because people are not screwing around with it in incompatble ways (they are inflicting that on perl6). The stabliity/compatibility, accumulated set of languages, and the fact the syntax is perfectly serviceable makes for a very solid scripting language choice, even for new projects.
Just because some people do not view it as 'hip', doesn't mean it isn't a good, reasona
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IMO, Perl 6 being finished probably would kill the language.
It won't. Perl 6 is a much more ambitious programming language, and as such will require more ressources (CPU, memory). Perl 6 is clearly directed to general programming while Perl 5 has always been useful as both a generic programming language and as a glueing tool for sysadmin tasks. The '-e' of Perl 6 will probably stay so slow that it will not be as useful as Perl 5 as a simple tool for small tasks.
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I meant if Perl6 'succeeds' at making distros deprecate perl5, then perl is doomed as perl6 won't be interesting compared to other contemporary scripting languages without the stability of perl5.
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I"m not sure what "not coming back" signifies. We run a decently large Perl codebase. We add some new features (nothing big) new code tends to go to python (though some new perl stuff). But changes in the tools as we maintain the codebase is important to us.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
Coming back?
It never left, I used it everyday.
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Right now I am (should be :) writing Perl code, and being paid for it.
And it's a big and important project, not just some utility scripts.
I also write one of my main pet projects in Perl.
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Coming back?
It never left, I used it everyday.
Hah, you got modded informative instead of funny.
Re:Hard to get started (Score:5, Informative)
I have a bias, but I've had many positive responses to Modern Perl: The Book [modernperlbooks.com].
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Slight bias indeed.
The man page to Moose is a good one too.
If you're in to web dev, the Definitive Guide to Catalyst [amazon.co.uk] is a good choice, too.
Unfortunately, I have to write this with a caveat: getting Catalyst and Moose set up can take some time. If you apt-get install/emerge/yum/whatever it, you'll probably get an old version.
If you install it from CPAN, it takes some time, since the two of them combine to require a craptonne of CPAN.
That said, once they're installed, a working catalyst web app you can hack
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Try some perl development the old fashioned way. Document a list of "PITA" about developing in perl. Simultaneously study at least one framework and slowly enumerate a list of "this is how framework X fixes the Y problem" ah "I know kung fu" or whatever. At some point those lists will converge. Then seamlessly start developing the new way using a framework.
You can also have a lot of fun trying to implement your own homemade framework. Being a text processing language, making a MVC like system isn't too
Re:Hard to get started (Score:4, Interesting)
Well that was embarassing. you don't want to see projecteuler.com. Try
http://projecteuler.net/ [projecteuler.net]
that works a heck of a lot better.
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I think you replied to the wrong story.
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We call that the CPAN, and it's the opposite of plummeted.
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Re:There will be no Perl renaissance (Score:5, Informative)
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 [tiobe.com] 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.
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What's *really scary* is a perl script with '#use strict;'. Meaning they tried to use strict; but gave up on it.
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No, they just can't figure out how to pass some of the checks and disable them. Generally upon investigation I find use strict complained for very good reason and I'm able to close out 'mysterious' bugs just by use strict.
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Every single one, or just you?
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I always try to write a lot of comments into my code, whatever the language.
Most sample code and tutorials do so too.
So I would say, why not post some real world programs in Perl and Python and let people see what they look like, including comments. Even in this thread I see people talking about line noise but frankly, I don't see it. There are a lot of things I don't use in regexes for example but I know it can be done and if I want to I can always perldoc on the command line and brush up on what I don't r