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Perl 6 sort of set itself up for a tremendous uphill battle. By taking so long to "firm up", in terms of specification (or the test suite, in this case), while

Perl 6 sort of set itself up for a tremendous uphill battle. By taking so long to "firm up", in terms of specification (or the test suite, in this case), while Perl 5 had a period of neglect, it lost a whole bunch of its early momentum to other languages. Sometimes, former Perl programmers have passed through two or three other languages as their "primary" language since they last called Perl home (I know there are several formerly reasonably well-known Perl folks who are more known now for their involvement in JavaScript, Go, or Haskell, or Rust, etc.). It would take a ridiculously advanced language to counter that turning of the tides. Luckily (or, I guess, not due to luck but because Perl 6 developers realized they had to deliver something amazing to justify the time lost in the wilderness), Perl 6 is a ridiculously advanced language. I haven't started a new project in Perl in several years (though my primary projects, which have existed for 9-17 years, are in Perl), but I'm strongly considering making my next project a Perl 6 project. It looks like a really fun language. All the stuff I like about Perl, with almost none of the stuff I don't, plus some advanced stuff that I don't even know enough to know why I might want it. But, I know that Higher Order Perl for Perl 5 (which I actually read while I was mostly working in Python) was a lot of fun and made me a better programmer, so I assume Perl 6 and its new paradigms will be similarly eye-opening.

monk_e_boy 11y ago
Happened to me, had to choose a language to write a web crawler in ended up with Python (this was 5 or 6 years ago.) We got a contractor in who was a Perl guru, he wrote one of the popular web frameworks but even he couldn't put forwards a good case for using it over PHP. And now in the company my brother works for (a cloud hosting provider) they are currently switching from Perl to Python.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  > one of the popular web frameworks Which?
  - gahahaha 11y ago
    Pretty sure the vagueness was intentional so as not to identify him.
    - monk_e_boy 11y ago
      Plus I can't remember cos it was a conversation we had 5 years ago. We talked over MVC and open source (we both had open source projects) PHP, Perl, C# and Python weighing up the best option to write all the code in. Ended up using Python. It used a multi threaded library and crashed every so often with all sorts of weird errors. Never got to the bottom of it.
- Natsu 11y ago
  I'd have thought that the security record of PHP would give Perl the edge, but perhaps that wasn't evaluated.
  - mgbmtl 11y ago
    I don't know.. this presentation is pretty discouraging: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292200_-_the_perl_jam_exploiting_a_20_year-old_vulnerability_-_netanel_rubin https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292... The track record for PHP in recent years has been pretty good.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      That was covered fairly extensively here[1], and there's some problems with that talk. First and foremost, the modules he's referring to are either not core, or deprecated (CGI). It's really more a case of poor programmer behavior and slightly confusing behavior in a once core (and long known to be problematic and avoided) recently (at the time) deprecated core module than a language problem. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813479
      - singingfish 11y ago
        argh too many parentheses in your reply. Short answer, need to develop on perl/sharedhosting fast? [pull this trick](https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/3xb6xz/neat_trick_for_emulating_an_old_crufty_shared/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/3xb6xz/neat_trick_for...).
- visarga 11y ago
  I too have to learn Python for the machine learning libraries. CPAN has very little ML.
- singingfish 11y ago
  Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills in perl are too much in demand, and b. Because for most of my normal work I haven't found anything perl can't do as easily or easier than other tools yet) here's my semi-considered opinion. Meh, all the dynamic languages are basically the same. They're all basically things that manpipulate strings and C pointers. For perl/python/ruby/js here's what I'd sort of recommend: * Pick from your team's strength, unless: * Lots of turnkey logic, code quality and debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP. * Lots of turnkey logic, per-performance isn't a problem and you want some higher order programming capability: Ruby. * You want to manage a java-like large team for not so trivial logic, and you prioritise uniformity over expressivity. Python. Also python is a good environment for academic work as it helps the academic programmers not shoot themselves in the foot so much and academic code is a mess. Which is why python is such a good extension language for other tools. * Async greenfield stuff where you don't need to worry about external libraries much: javascript. Also the only game in town for web front ends (plus its transpiling friends). Javascript is like a syntatically impoverished perl in this regard. * You've got a whole bunch of mess in business logic and/or systems logic that you need to encapsulate, and you've got a small highly capable team who want to prioritise expressivity over uniformity. Perl excels here. So does python, but it'll make you do even more horrible things papering over the mess. Regarding the last point, I believe if it reaches a tipping point perl 6 will be a good thing for async, multicore and parsing related stuff, and should be long-term productive and reduce the requirement for having as highly capable and a disciplined team that is really a requirement for non-trivial perl5 code bases. Also perl5 is second to none for programming language back compat. I had a decent sized non-trivial project I'd written for internal (research) purposes, then neglected for several years. Then I had to look at the running code again. I'd been through several minor OS upgrades, moved to a completely different OS and gone through at least three major versions of perl. Aside from a couple of missing CPAN modules that I had forgotten about in the Makefile.PL, everything was fine out of the box.
  - amenod 11y ago
    I have a nagging feeling that server side JavaScript will soon become the new PHP. It is getting more and more popular among not-so-good programmers, and given its loose syntax I think it will lead to disastrous code. Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. Of course, PHP makers made their share of mistakes with their decisions - register_globals, safe_mode (which was not), inconsistent function naming in standard libs, myriad of weird bugs (like syntax error (still) throwing HTTP response 200),...
kev009 11y ago
This is probably one of the best unintended things to ever happen. Using other languages is the equivalent of world travel for a human. All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers, and perl is among the top of that category for a variety of reasons. I have seen maintainable, performant perl5, but the barrier is high.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  That's a nice way of looking at the brain drain in the Perl community over the last decade. And, you're probably right. If we think in terms of general health of the free and open programming world, it has been remarkably improved by some of the folks who've migrated through different languages over the years. To the point where we have not one, not two, not a dozen, really nice languages with excellent communities, but several dozens of them (and at least two dozen that are large enough and effective enough to build pretty much anything with them). We have an embarrassment of riches, frankly. There was a time when going into a large project, you could choose between Java, C/C++, or Perl. There were outliers (even some with significant footholds in some industries, like TCL), but those were the options I saw in front of me at every junction. Today, we can choose to work in so many languages, and get good results, find good community, find good library and tooling and cross-platform support, and enjoy all the stuff we found so nice about Perl way back when.
  - kev009 11y ago
    Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box. Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong. I am thankful for perl's influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing. I'm skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there's been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn't matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.
devit 11y ago
How is it really advanced? I was under the impression that it's just another dynamic scripting language semantically equivalent to Perl5, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so on. And obviously new languages of this kind aren't going to be very successful or interesting because knowing and using JavaScript is going to be mandatory forever due to browsers and with Babel and ES6/7 it's as good as any other such language. Plus in addition to JavaScript, Ruby, Python and PHP have a lot of momentum as well.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I wouldn't discount language advances, there's kind of a Renaissance happening with languages the past couple years... even newer options Closure/ClosureScript along with new looks at Erlang, Haskell, F# etc... and JS bringing in new patterns. WebAssembly will offer many options as browser adoption happens and cross-compilation with support for source maps is becoming very common as well. I'm a fan of JS and ES5/7 in particular... that doesn't mean that other options won't take root. JS has plenty of advantages in that it's the same code client/server, less disconnect in objects, serialization constructs built in (JSON), easy translation to/from dbms (no ORM needed), etc. Just the same, a decade ago, everyone avoided JS like the plague.

monk_e_boy 11y ago

Happened to me, had to choose a language to write a web crawler in ended up with Python (this was 5 or 6 years ago.) We got a contractor in who was a Perl guru, he wrote one of the popular web frameworks but even he couldn't put forwards a good case for using it over PHP. And now in the company my brother works for (a cloud hosting provider) they are currently switching from Perl to Python.

Mithaldu 11y ago
> one of the popular web frameworks Which?
- gahahaha 11y ago
  Pretty sure the vagueness was intentional so as not to identify him.
  - monk_e_boy 11y ago
    Plus I can't remember cos it was a conversation we had 5 years ago. We talked over MVC and open source (we both had open source projects) PHP, Perl, C# and Python weighing up the best option to write all the code in. Ended up using Python. It used a multi threaded library and crashed every so often with all sorts of weird errors. Never got to the bottom of it.
Natsu 11y ago
I'd have thought that the security record of PHP would give Perl the edge, but perhaps that wasn't evaluated.
- mgbmtl 11y ago
  I don't know.. this presentation is pretty discouraging: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292200_-_the_perl_jam_exploiting_a_20_year-old_vulnerability_-_netanel_rubin https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6243_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412292... The track record for PHP in recent years has been pretty good.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    That was covered fairly extensively here[1], and there's some problems with that talk. First and foremost, the modules he's referring to are either not core, or deprecated (CGI). It's really more a case of poor programmer behavior and slightly confusing behavior in a once core (and long known to be problematic and avoided) recently (at the time) deprecated core module than a language problem. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813479
    - singingfish 11y ago
      argh too many parentheses in your reply. Short answer, need to develop on perl/sharedhosting fast? [pull this trick](https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/3xb6xz/neat_trick_for_emulating_an_old_crufty_shared/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/3xb6xz/neat_trick_for...).
visarga 11y ago
I too have to learn Python for the machine learning libraries. CPAN has very little ML.
singingfish 11y ago
Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills in perl are too much in demand, and b. Because for most of my normal work I haven't found anything perl can't do as easily or easier than other tools yet) here's my semi-considered opinion. Meh, all the dynamic languages are basically the same. They're all basically things that manpipulate strings and C pointers. For perl/python/ruby/js here's what I'd sort of recommend: * Pick from your team's strength, unless: * Lots of turnkey logic, code quality and debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP. * Lots of turnkey logic, per-performance isn't a problem and you want some higher order programming capability: Ruby. * You want to manage a java-like large team for not so trivial logic, and you prioritise uniformity over expressivity. Python. Also python is a good environment for academic work as it helps the academic programmers not shoot themselves in the foot so much and academic code is a mess. Which is why python is such a good extension language for other tools. * Async greenfield stuff where you don't need to worry about external libraries much: javascript. Also the only game in town for web front ends (plus its transpiling friends). Javascript is like a syntatically impoverished perl in this regard. * You've got a whole bunch of mess in business logic and/or systems logic that you need to encapsulate, and you've got a small highly capable team who want to prioritise expressivity over uniformity. Perl excels here. So does python, but it'll make you do even more horrible things papering over the mess. Regarding the last point, I believe if it reaches a tipping point perl 6 will be a good thing for async, multicore and parsing related stuff, and should be long-term productive and reduce the requirement for having as highly capable and a disciplined team that is really a requirement for non-trivial perl5 code bases. Also perl5 is second to none for programming language back compat. I had a decent sized non-trivial project I'd written for internal (research) purposes, then neglected for several years. Then I had to look at the running code again. I'd been through several minor OS upgrades, moved to a completely different OS and gone through at least three major versions of perl. Aside from a couple of missing CPAN modules that I had forgotten about in the Makefile.PL, everything was fine out of the box.
- amenod 11y ago
  I have a nagging feeling that server side JavaScript will soon become the new PHP. It is getting more and more popular among not-so-good programmers, and given its loose syntax I think it will lead to disastrous code. Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. Of course, PHP makers made their share of mistakes with their decisions - register_globals, safe_mode (which was not), inconsistent function naming in standard libs, myriad of weird bugs (like syntax error (still) throwing HTTP response 200),...

kev009 11y ago

This is probably one of the best unintended things to ever happen. Using other languages is the equivalent of world travel for a human. All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers, and perl is among the top of that category for a variety of reasons. I have seen maintainable, performant perl5, but the barrier is high.

SwellJoe 11y ago
That's a nice way of looking at the brain drain in the Perl community over the last decade. And, you're probably right. If we think in terms of general health of the free and open programming world, it has been remarkably improved by some of the folks who've migrated through different languages over the years. To the point where we have not one, not two, not a dozen, really nice languages with excellent communities, but several dozens of them (and at least two dozen that are large enough and effective enough to build pretty much anything with them). We have an embarrassment of riches, frankly. There was a time when going into a large project, you could choose between Java, C/C++, or Perl. There were outliers (even some with significant footholds in some industries, like TCL), but those were the options I saw in front of me at every junction. Today, we can choose to work in so many languages, and get good results, find good community, find good library and tooling and cross-platform support, and enjoy all the stuff we found so nice about Perl way back when.
- kev009 11y ago
  Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box. Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong. I am thankful for perl's influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing. I'm skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there's been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn't matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.

devit 11y ago

How is it really advanced? I was under the impression that it's just another dynamic scripting language semantically equivalent to Perl5, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and so on. And obviously new languages of this kind aren't going to be very successful or interesting because knowing and using JavaScript is going to be mandatory forever due to browsers and with Babel and ES6/7 it's as good as any other such language. Plus in addition to JavaScript, Ruby, Python and PHP have a lot of momentum as well.

tracker1 11y ago
I wouldn't discount language advances, there's kind of a Renaissance happening with languages the past couple years... even newer options Closure/ClosureScript along with new looks at Erlang, Haskell, F# etc... and JS bringing in new patterns. WebAssembly will offer many options as browser adoption happens and cross-compilation with support for source maps is becoming very common as well. I'm a fan of JS and ES5/7 in particular... that doesn't mean that other options won't take root. JS has plenty of advantages in that it's the same code client/server, less disconnect in objects, serialization constructs built in (JSON), easy translation to/from dbms (no ORM needed), etc. Just the same, a decade ago, everyone avoided JS like the plague.