4 ms·

Several years ago I would be raving about it. I attended several YAPC's established the first perlmongers group in my country. When I went to see the state of

by toadi 16y ago

Several years ago I would be raving about it. I attended several YAPC's established the first perlmongers group in my country. When I went to see the state of perl a few months back I noticed the language is maturing, CPAN is still strong. I think they have a PR problem.

loewenskind 16y ago
It's not a PR problem. People have been trying to fix the "PR problem" for at least half a decade. If that were the issue they would have made headway by now. The real issue is that a new programming language can be quite an investment. Some people learn lots of languages but many people actually stick with just one. Perl has nothing compelling over the other languages. You don't really lose anything buy picking e.g. Python or Ruby instead. So people tend to pick a language based on what cool new thing is written in it and that cool new thing is never in perl. Perl always rushes in later with a "me too" copy but it's never where a new breakthrough happens.
- darklajid 16y ago
  One could argue that "cool new things" being never written in perl _is_ a ~marketing~ problem. I think the GP was actually trying to say that the traction is missing for an otherwise nice and mature/stable infrastructure. A couple of "shiny" projects that boldly host with a powered by perl on their page might bring in fresh blood..
  - mst 16y ago
    One could equally argue that not jumping on new concepts until they've been demonstrated to have real world value is an advantage. As a community, we tend to like to really think about things before implementing them - which means that while new ideas might turn up in perl a bit later than in other places, they tend to turn up in a well thought out way that we can confidently maintain backwards compatibility with over time. When you're writing code that may still be in production in five or ten years, this tends to be an advantage.
- CurrentB 16y ago
  Not only that, but the threat of a non-backwards compatible upgrade being just around the corner is a major point against picking up Perl at this time, and the uncertain release time frame of Perl 6 makes that not exactly an attractive choice for a language to learn.
  - thomas11 16y ago
    Perl 6 is not really an upgrade, except in the most general sense. It's a new Perlish language, and Perl 5 will have a long and happy life besides Perl 6, even when (if?) the latter is used in production.
  - mst 16y ago
    perl6 is a separate language designed by some of the same people. I'm a perl5 hacker at heart and intend to continue to be. The latest version of perl5 is version 12.3, released rather recently. The websites for both languages now make this clear, but we'll probably need to rename them both to "-something- perl" for people to stop being confused by the names. Maybe in the next year or so.
    - darkandbrooding 16y ago
      The Zope community experienced similar (self inflicted) branding damage with Zope 3. The goal of Zope 3 was to build a next-generation rapid app development toolkit, incorporating lessons learned over the life of Zope 2. This is perfectly laudable goal, but developers heard "zope" and thought they could leverage existing knowledge, best practices, and tools. Then they learned that "zope 2" products wouldn't work under zope 3. Then they learned how much they would have to unlearn from one project to the other. Then they gnashed their terrible teeth, and roared their terrible roars, and finally the zope 3 developers got the message and renamed their framework "Bluebream." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream ) As someone who worked at a shop that migrated from python/Zope to java/hibernate/GWT during the "zope 3 WTF?" days, I can attest that the confusion created by poor naming choices, and the lack of clarity in product roadmaps, was indeed a factor in deciding to migrate entirely away from Zope.
  - 16y ago
- toadi 16y ago
  At least it is used a lot in financial institutions.
- jonknee 16y ago
  Just because it has been a while doesn't mean it's not a PR problem. I know I'm not alone in the group of people who know and have used Perl, but just don't use it anymore. There's no big investment required, I've just moved on.
rst 16y ago
IMHO, the PR problem is twofold. The first is that Perl 5 (the mature language) suffered greatly from the premature announcement of the Perl 6 project, more than ten years ago, which still hasn't shipped anything as stable and mature as, say, Python 3. (Several years ago, someone at my company showed up to work carrying a book entitled "Perl 6 Today". I asked where he'd gotten the time machine.) The second is that if you look at blog posts and the like from inside the Perl community, such as it now is, you get the impression that it's the kind of crowd that thinks they're smarter than everyone else because no one else gets their inside jokes. Which comes from the top --- Larry Wall seems to think he's really clever when he justifies some of Perl's more dubious features by pointing out that natural languages do that too. But natural language has a full human intelligence at the other end sorting out the ambiguities, and even then, we still sometimes get it wrong. "Rakudo Star" is not that smart, much less Perl 5.
- sigzero 16y ago
  Please tell me you aren't comparing the timelines of Perl6 with Python3? That is ludicrous. Py3 is an incremental change while P6 is a total re-write of the language. Not even in the same league.
  - rst 16y ago
    No, I'm saying that ten years is a long time for Perl 5 to be under the shadow of an anointed successor which has yet to show up --- something which is a real problem now for the Python folks even though they're going through a smaller change which was better managed in every respect.
    - chromatic 16y ago
      So many of the improvements in the Perl ecosystem--especially the Perl 5 ecosystem--have their roots in Perl 6 it's difficult to say that Perl 5 is in its shadow. If anything, Perl 6 rejuvenated Perl 5: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-perl-renaissance.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-...

by toadi 16y ago

loewenskind 16y ago

It's not a PR problem. People have been trying to fix the "PR problem" for at least half a decade. If that were the issue they would have made headway by now. The real issue is that a new programming language can be quite an investment. Some people learn lots of languages but many people actually stick with just one. Perl has nothing compelling over the other languages. You don't really lose anything buy picking e.g. Python or Ruby instead. So people tend to pick a language based on what cool new thing is written in it and that cool new thing is never in perl. Perl always rushes in later with a "me too" copy but it's never where a new breakthrough happens.

darklajid 16y ago
One could argue that "cool new things" being never written in perl _is_ a ~marketing~ problem. I think the GP was actually trying to say that the traction is missing for an otherwise nice and mature/stable infrastructure. A couple of "shiny" projects that boldly host with a powered by perl on their page might bring in fresh blood..
- mst 16y ago
  One could equally argue that not jumping on new concepts until they've been demonstrated to have real world value is an advantage. As a community, we tend to like to really think about things before implementing them - which means that while new ideas might turn up in perl a bit later than in other places, they tend to turn up in a well thought out way that we can confidently maintain backwards compatibility with over time. When you're writing code that may still be in production in five or ten years, this tends to be an advantage.
CurrentB 16y ago
Not only that, but the threat of a non-backwards compatible upgrade being just around the corner is a major point against picking up Perl at this time, and the uncertain release time frame of Perl 6 makes that not exactly an attractive choice for a language to learn.
- thomas11 16y ago
  Perl 6 is not really an upgrade, except in the most general sense. It's a new Perlish language, and Perl 5 will have a long and happy life besides Perl 6, even when (if?) the latter is used in production.
- mst 16y ago
  perl6 is a separate language designed by some of the same people. I'm a perl5 hacker at heart and intend to continue to be. The latest version of perl5 is version 12.3, released rather recently. The websites for both languages now make this clear, but we'll probably need to rename them both to "-something- perl" for people to stop being confused by the names. Maybe in the next year or so.
  - darkandbrooding 16y ago
    The Zope community experienced similar (self inflicted) branding damage with Zope 3. The goal of Zope 3 was to build a next-generation rapid app development toolkit, incorporating lessons learned over the life of Zope 2. This is perfectly laudable goal, but developers heard "zope" and thought they could leverage existing knowledge, best practices, and tools. Then they learned that "zope 2" products wouldn't work under zope 3. Then they learned how much they would have to unlearn from one project to the other. Then they gnashed their terrible teeth, and roared their terrible roars, and finally the zope 3 developers got the message and renamed their framework "Bluebream." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream ) As someone who worked at a shop that migrated from python/Zope to java/hibernate/GWT during the "zope 3 WTF?" days, I can attest that the confusion created by poor naming choices, and the lack of clarity in product roadmaps, was indeed a factor in deciding to migrate entirely away from Zope.
- 16y ago
toadi 16y ago
At least it is used a lot in financial institutions.
jonknee 16y ago
Just because it has been a while doesn't mean it's not a PR problem. I know I'm not alone in the group of people who know and have used Perl, but just don't use it anymore. There's no big investment required, I've just moved on.

rst 16y ago

IMHO, the PR problem is twofold. The first is that Perl 5 (the mature language) suffered greatly from the premature announcement of the Perl 6 project, more than ten years ago, which still hasn't shipped anything as stable and mature as, say, Python 3. (Several years ago, someone at my company showed up to work carrying a book entitled "Perl 6 Today". I asked where he'd gotten the time machine.) The second is that if you look at blog posts and the like from inside the Perl community, such as it now is, you get the impression that it's the kind of crowd that thinks they're smarter than everyone else because no one else gets their inside jokes. Which comes from the top --- Larry Wall seems to think he's really clever when he justifies some of Perl's more dubious features by pointing out that natural languages do that too. But natural language has a full human intelligence at the other end sorting out the ambiguities, and even then, we still sometimes get it wrong. "Rakudo Star" is not that smart, much less Perl 5.

sigzero 16y ago
Please tell me you aren't comparing the timelines of Perl6 with Python3? That is ludicrous. Py3 is an incremental change while P6 is a total re-write of the language. Not even in the same league.
- rst 16y ago
  No, I'm saying that ten years is a long time for Perl 5 to be under the shadow of an anointed successor which has yet to show up --- something which is a real problem now for the Python folks even though they're going through a smaller change which was better managed in every respect.
  - chromatic 16y ago
    So many of the improvements in the Perl ecosystem--especially the Perl 5 ecosystem--have their roots in Perl 6 it's difficult to say that Perl 5 is in its shadow. If anything, Perl 6 rejuvenated Perl 5: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-perl-renaissance.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-...