13 ms·

Why do you say that? Java's still not up to the features of Perl 5 (released in 1994). Besides, if you want evolution in Perl, look to the CPAN or Perl 6.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
I'm talking about rate of change in the core language. Nobody sane would look at Perl 5 and say "ayup, this is an excellent stopping point, this language is a perfect distillation of the core Perl ideals and idioms". And yet despite fewer hindrances than Java, Perl has stagnated just as much. (If you want to talk modules and unreleased languages you might as well bring in Clojure, Scala, Jython, etc.) If you really want to be embarrassed by Perl's stagnation, compare it to Python, Ruby, or even C#.
- chromatic 16y ago
  What an artificial distinction to make! Perl 5 exists as it is for the sake of backwards compatibility. Very few misfeatures suffer deprecation, few deprecations experience removal, and almost any code example you can find as far back as 1987 runs unmodified on Perl 5.13.x (whichever monthly release is the most recent). I also find it difficult to compare language features between Python and Ruby or Perl when neither Python nor Ruby can get lexical scoping right. That seems like a very basic principle of language design. Update: I forgot to write that Perl 6 is the Perl version which explores improvements in the core language.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    My point is that Perl 5 is still the most recent released version of Perl. Perl 6 is somewhere on the horizon (out there with Java 1.6 and C++ 0x). Even if Perl 6 gets released tomorrow, then what? Another decade and a half until Perl 7? Nobody's going to wait around another 30 or 45 years for Perl to become the language it was meant to be, they'll move on long before then, if they haven't already.
    - chromatic 16y ago
      Rakudo Star's third release is today. (I'm not going to argue any silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!" because other people have no trouble building productive things with Rakudo, like they've done for the other two releases of Rakudo Star and the other thirty three releases of Rakudo.)
      - loewenskind 16y ago
        Does it support all of the perl6 spec?
        draegtun 16y ago
        Seems to support the vast majority of the spec: http://rakudo.de/ http://rakudo.de/ (something like 85% to 90% to my naked eye as at July). And according to Rakudo status page (http://rakudo.org/status http://rakudo.org/status) below are the common things that don't quite work yet: * big integers * nested package/grammar/class declarations * typed arrays and attributes * state variables * multi-level wrapping * macros * threads/concurrency * longest-token matching * :dba adverb in regexes So it is pretty usable... enough that even a static blogging app has been writen in Rakudo: http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/dog-food-with-a-distinct-perl6-flavor http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/dog-food-with-a-distinct...
        loewenskind 16y ago
        It may be usable, but my point was: you can't call something "complete" when it doesn't implement its own spec. Imagine telling your boss "Look, I've released this thing three times now! I know it's just now doing 85-90% of what you asked, but still, what is your problem?!".
        draegtun 16y ago
        The Rakudo developers have never said that Rakudo Star was a complete implementation of the Perl 6 spec. They called it a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 (http://rakudo.org/node/75 http://rakudo.org/node/75). Anyway I'm a "glass is half full" type of person and I view the 85-90% has a good thing (and I think the "boss", ie. Larry Wall would agree :)
  - lelele 16y ago
    > Perl 5 exists as it is for the sake of backwards compatibility. This is really says it all: a language, just like any software, develops when issues are fixed without breaking existing code. What's so ugly with having a language version declaration on top of a file, or something better? Why I can link any language to C and still I'm not able to use different versions of the very same language at once? Having newcomers wrestle with ancient issues is not progress, IMO.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I'm talking about rate of change in the core language. Nobody sane would look at Perl 5 and say "ayup, this is an excellent stopping point, this language is a perfect distillation of the core Perl ideals and idioms". And yet despite fewer hindrances than Java, Perl has stagnated just as much. (If you want to talk modules and unreleased languages you might as well bring in Clojure, Scala, Jython, etc.) If you really want to be embarrassed by Perl's stagnation, compare it to Python, Ruby, or even C#.

chromatic 16y ago
What an artificial distinction to make! Perl 5 exists as it is for the sake of backwards compatibility. Very few misfeatures suffer deprecation, few deprecations experience removal, and almost any code example you can find as far back as 1987 runs unmodified on Perl 5.13.x (whichever monthly release is the most recent). I also find it difficult to compare language features between Python and Ruby or Perl when neither Python nor Ruby can get lexical scoping right. That seems like a very basic principle of language design. Update: I forgot to write that Perl 6 is the Perl version which explores improvements in the core language.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  My point is that Perl 5 is still the most recent released version of Perl. Perl 6 is somewhere on the horizon (out there with Java 1.6 and C++ 0x). Even if Perl 6 gets released tomorrow, then what? Another decade and a half until Perl 7? Nobody's going to wait around another 30 or 45 years for Perl to become the language it was meant to be, they'll move on long before then, if they haven't already.
  - chromatic 16y ago
    Rakudo Star's third release is today. (I'm not going to argue any silly pseudo-intellectual ontological rebuttal of "oh but it's not really a release!" because other people have no trouble building productive things with Rakudo, like they've done for the other two releases of Rakudo Star and the other thirty three releases of Rakudo.)
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      Does it support all of the perl6 spec?
      - draegtun 16y ago
        Seems to support the vast majority of the spec: http://rakudo.de/ http://rakudo.de/ (something like 85% to 90% to my naked eye as at July). And according to Rakudo status page (http://rakudo.org/status http://rakudo.org/status) below are the common things that don't quite work yet: * big integers * nested package/grammar/class declarations * typed arrays and attributes * state variables * multi-level wrapping * macros * threads/concurrency * longest-token matching * :dba adverb in regexes So it is pretty usable... enough that even a static blogging app has been writen in Rakudo: http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/dog-food-with-a-distinct-perl6-flavor http://strangelyconsistent.org/blog/dog-food-with-a-distinct...
        loewenskind 16y ago
        It may be usable, but my point was: you can't call something "complete" when it doesn't implement its own spec. Imagine telling your boss "Look, I've released this thing three times now! I know it's just now doing 85-90% of what you asked, but still, what is your problem?!".
        draegtun 16y ago
        The Rakudo developers have never said that Rakudo Star was a complete implementation of the Perl 6 spec. They called it a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 (http://rakudo.org/node/75 http://rakudo.org/node/75). Anyway I'm a "glass is half full" type of person and I view the 85-90% has a good thing (and I think the "boss", ie. Larry Wall would agree :)
- lelele 16y ago
  > Perl 5 exists as it is for the sake of backwards compatibility. This is really says it all: a language, just like any software, develops when issues are fixed without breaking existing code. What's so ugly with having a language version declaration on top of a file, or something better? Why I can link any language to C and still I'm not able to use different versions of the very same language at once? Having newcomers wrestle with ancient issues is not progress, IMO.