7 ms·

Consider this: Perl codebase is reaching perfection and no longer needs releases. After this, we get eternal Perl ;)

by _rrnv 7y ago

mirceal 7y ago
aka Perl 6
- gerad 7y ago
  Perl Nukem Forever?
  - zeristor 7y ago
    ”Don’t have time to Perl with myself”
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Wait, what? Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. The ecosystem for the language is also evolving at a good pace.
    - antisemiotic 7y ago
      >Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. So is Duke Nukem Forever.
      - eiro 7y ago
        we waited for them since the very beginning of the millenium, i played with both and here is the difference: DNF is very desapointed and is not the revolution i expected. Perl6 is a game changer and push the idea of "scripting" way beyond i was imagining it (and i played with a lot of langages)
        gmueckl 7y ago
        Perl 6 is more than a scripting language. It clearly has elements of a very general high level language that can scale to large program sizes.
        eiro 7y ago
        true
    - Izkata 7y ago
      It seems that the most advanced implementation doesn't yet have all the Perl 6 features in the spec..?
      - cygx 7y ago
        The written specification wasn't being kept in sync with the implementation and has been relegated to the status of 'design document'. The language is nowadays defined and versioned through its test suite, and there have been two releases (v6.c in Dec 2015 and v6.d in Nov 2018).
simias 7y ago
These are for third-party packages though, Perl might be perfect but the rest of the software world not so much... That dwindling number of submissions not only means that new libraries are not being integrated as fast as they should but also, and perhaps more importantly, existing libraries are not updated. It's pretty sad too because I distinctly remember that one of the main selling points of Perl when I started using it in the early 2000's was that CPAN was more complete and diverse than any other scripting language out there.
tanilama 7y ago
Even enternal security?
trabant00 7y ago
From a experienced linux sysadmin point of view perl5 is as good as it gets. I've been searching for alternatives for about 10 years now, at first because my novice self was heaving headaches reading other people code and even my own. I hated perl but I hated everything else even more as I came to know them. No autovivification? Some assignments copy the data and some create references and you need to memorize the conventions of which does what? 3x to 10x lower performance? My program crashes because of white space? Fuck that! Back to perl5. I'm sorry to say nothing can replace perl5 for me even now in 2019. I wish something would come along even if it takes years. We need alternatives and competition, perl5 will get too old at some point and 6 is... I don't even want to go there.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > No autovivification? Wow, thanks. I had been looking for this word to explain what happens in awk. Now I know what it's called!
- ajsnigrutin 7y ago
  It's not perfect, but it does it job, and usually it's simpler/faster to write code than in some other langues (usually with the cost of worse readability).
- abacadaba 7y ago
  Pretty sure if perl5 had only had multi-dimensional arrays it would still rule the world.
  - VVertigo 7y ago
    Didn't perl always have multi-dimensional arrays? Just the syntax sugar for them is more recent.
    - simcop2387 7y ago
      Not quite, references were introduced in perl 5, in perl 4 and earlier had a different method that wasn't quite multi-dimensional arrays but tried to behave that way. $hash{1,2,3} = 10; This actually ends up doing the following $hash{join($;, 1, 2, 3)} = 10; It builds up a single key from the list using the special variable $; as a separator to the elements. With perl 5 you gained the ability to make references which allow you to actually make multiple dimensions and to do it on arrays, not just hashes. $array[1][2][3] = 10; That also allows for more complicated data structures and much easier ways to iterate through the structures.
bhouston 7y ago
This is exactly the same reason that they stopped updating Microsoft DOS -- they achieved perfection. That or it become obsolete. I guess it depends on to what degree one is nostalgic and to what degree one needs to keep their skills up to date.
jwr 7y ago
This isn't as much of a joke as it sounds. I've just written a utility I needed in Perl. I tend to think about some things in the long term, and this utility is something I want to be able to run 10 years from now. [it's a concistency checker (hasher) for file archives, to find out if the bits in your copy are really the ones you put there, important for multi-GB photo archives — see https://github.com/jwr/ccheck https://github.com/jwr/ccheck] I do most of my programming in Clojure, which has excellent backwards compatibility and takes a long-term perspective. I still run some unmodified Clojure code from 8 years ago. And yet for really long term stuff, I would much rather write it in Perl. It has been around for a very long time, is very mature, and can be expected to last, even if it isn't the latest fashionable trend. Take a look at the various programming languages+environments around you: there will be very few where you can expect to be able to run your code even 2-3 years from now, much less decades later.

Consider this: Perl codebase is reaching perfection and no longer needs releases. After this, we get eternal Perl ;)

by _rrnv 7y ago

Consider this: Perl codebase is reaching perfection and no longer needs releases. After this, we get eternal Perl ;)

mirceal 7y ago

aka Perl 6

gerad 7y ago
Perl Nukem Forever?
- zeristor 7y ago
  ”Don’t have time to Perl with myself”
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Wait, what? Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. The ecosystem for the language is also evolving at a good pace.
  - antisemiotic 7y ago
    >Perl 6 is real, released and essentially stable. So is Duke Nukem Forever.
    - eiro 7y ago
      we waited for them since the very beginning of the millenium, i played with both and here is the difference: DNF is very desapointed and is not the revolution i expected. Perl6 is a game changer and push the idea of "scripting" way beyond i was imagining it (and i played with a lot of langages)
      - gmueckl 7y ago
        Perl 6 is more than a scripting language. It clearly has elements of a very general high level language that can scale to large program sizes.
        eiro 7y ago
        true
  - Izkata 7y ago
    It seems that the most advanced implementation doesn't yet have all the Perl 6 features in the spec..?
    - cygx 7y ago
      The written specification wasn't being kept in sync with the implementation and has been relegated to the status of 'design document'. The language is nowadays defined and versioned through its test suite, and there have been two releases (v6.c in Dec 2015 and v6.d in Nov 2018).

simias 7y ago

These are for third-party packages though, Perl might be perfect but the rest of the software world not so much... That dwindling number of submissions not only means that new libraries are not being integrated as fast as they should but also, and perhaps more importantly, existing libraries are not updated. It's pretty sad too because I distinctly remember that one of the main selling points of Perl when I started using it in the early 2000's was that CPAN was more complete and diverse than any other scripting language out there.

tanilama 7y ago

Even enternal security?

trabant00 7y ago

From a experienced linux sysadmin point of view perl5 is as good as it gets. I've been searching for alternatives for about 10 years now, at first because my novice self was heaving headaches reading other people code and even my own. I hated perl but I hated everything else even more as I came to know them. No autovivification? Some assignments copy the data and some create references and you need to memorize the conventions of which does what? 3x to 10x lower performance? My program crashes because of white space? Fuck that! Back to perl5. I'm sorry to say nothing can replace perl5 for me even now in 2019. I wish something would come along even if it takes years. We need alternatives and competition, perl5 will get too old at some point and 6 is... I don't even want to go there.

mehrdadn 7y ago
> No autovivification? Wow, thanks. I had been looking for this word to explain what happens in awk. Now I know what it's called!
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
It's not perfect, but it does it job, and usually it's simpler/faster to write code than in some other langues (usually with the cost of worse readability).
abacadaba 7y ago
Pretty sure if perl5 had only had multi-dimensional arrays it would still rule the world.
- VVertigo 7y ago
  Didn't perl always have multi-dimensional arrays? Just the syntax sugar for them is more recent.
  - simcop2387 7y ago
    Not quite, references were introduced in perl 5, in perl 4 and earlier had a different method that wasn't quite multi-dimensional arrays but tried to behave that way. $hash{1,2,3} = 10; This actually ends up doing the following $hash{join($;, 1, 2, 3)} = 10; It builds up a single key from the list using the special variable $; as a separator to the elements. With perl 5 you gained the ability to make references which allow you to actually make multiple dimensions and to do it on arrays, not just hashes. $array[1][2][3] = 10; That also allows for more complicated data structures and much easier ways to iterate through the structures.

bhouston 7y ago

This is exactly the same reason that they stopped updating Microsoft DOS -- they achieved perfection. That or it become obsolete. I guess it depends on to what degree one is nostalgic and to what degree one needs to keep their skills up to date.

jwr 7y ago

This isn't as much of a joke as it sounds. I've just written a utility I needed in Perl. I tend to think about some things in the long term, and this utility is something I want to be able to run 10 years from now. [it's a concistency checker (hasher) for file archives, to find out if the bits in your copy are really the ones you put there, important for multi-GB photo archives — see https://github.com/jwr/ccheck https://github.com/jwr/ccheck] I do most of my programming in Clojure, which has excellent backwards compatibility and takes a long-term perspective. I still run some unmodified Clojure code from 8 years ago. And yet for really long term stuff, I would much rather write it in Perl. It has been around for a very long time, is very mature, and can be expected to last, even if it isn't the latest fashionable trend. Take a look at the various programming languages+environments around you: there will be very few where you can expect to be able to run your code even 2-3 years from now, much less decades later.