11 ms·

Perl Master Plan

72 points by mmoez 7y ago

throwanem 7y ago
This is a great bit! This is a bit, right?
rchaves 7y ago
why? It's never explained why
jhfdbkofdcho 7y ago
I love Perl, but this is delusional
- lizmat 7y ago
  Indeed. Especially when you realize this is only the first of many sites Will Brasswell wants other people to make: perlpackages.com perlcontainers.com perlvm.com perlclouds.com perlaccessibility.com perlinstall.com perlgames.com perloffice.com perlapps.com perlservers.com perlgrandchallenges.com perlhackathons.com spacescouting.org perlscouts.com certifiedyouthprogrammer.com programmingmeritbadge.com mlperl.com scienceperl.com perldemos.com perljobs.work perllegacy.com perlpodcasts.com perlvideos.com perlbrochures.com perlflyers.com perlmerchandise.com perlpapers.com perlnewsroom.com perlblogs.com perlinfographics.com perlbeer.com perlparties.com perlconferences.com perlmulticore.com perlsupercomputers.com perlspeed.com perlfamily.org
martythemaniak 7y ago
This is great. But what is it?
- cestith 7y ago
  TL;DR: this is the manifesto of a self-selected maintainer of a largely incompatible fork who has growing delusions of usefulness. This is a splitter's manifesto of what he's going to do right where he blames everyone else for shortcomings he's done little to nothing to help overcome. He's too egotistical and toxic to get any work merged into the mainline project, so he has decided to lead from outside the established community and separate from the established foundation. He's a technically quite competent developer who can't work well with others. He speaks for himself and claims broad support and calls his ramblings a master plan, implying that he's a master planner for the whole community. Most of his plans don't even involve Perl mainline or Raku. He's pushing his own RPerl and Reini Urban's CPerl both of which depart from the Perl code base. He does this while calling others stupid and difficult and repeatedly violating the CoC of The Perl Foundation online and at several major events (including repeated harassment over gender, gender identity, sexuality, physical disabilities, and his perceptions of other people's moral obligations and shortcomings under his religion). During the recent Perl6 to Raku rename, when the plan was to create a new Facebook group for Raku and direct visitors to the Raku group from the Perl 6 group, he unilaterally renamed the Perl 6 group to reflect the name change. So we had two Raku groups and no group for people to find it by the old name and be redirected. All the old posts to the Perl 6 group were now in the newly renamed Raku group. Since a group can only by renamed every so often, the fresh Raku group was renamed by the founder of the group to be "Perl 6" for discoverability and aimed at the old, original group now named "Raku" but with posts predating the name change talking about Perl 6. Rather than apologizing when the difficulty he caused was pointed out, he claimed nobody would look under the old name during the transition period and he was doing everyone a favor with his rash actions since the founder of both groups hadn't rushed headlong into the same decision. He also has a history of using images and other assets without permission or even attribution. He claims t if something isn't watermarked with a copyright he's in the clear, which is obviously false on its face in any Berne Convention country. Then he wonders why he gets disinvited and nobody wants to work with him on merging his work upstream. So since everyone else isn't playing by his rules, he has apparently decided to once again apply his own rules to everyone else and claim to speak for The Perl Foundation and the larger Perl community despite no mandate at all to do so.
smacktoward 7y ago
This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what Perl needs: more Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a language are the ways that language satisfies what users and developers need. If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.
- pressurefree 7y ago
  ya he has pearl vision lol... needs to get his i's checks
- agentultra 7y ago
  Have tried this with Common Lisp and Haskell. I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the right time and app/platform exclusivity. That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo. That sounds a bit the end of progress. After all, Go, Rust, and Swift haven't been around for that long. I might be open to an argument that ecosystem effects (libraries, training, etc.) lead to power law effects. But I'm not sure I believe that. I could equally well believe that the sheer scale of software development today lends itself to a lot of viable niches.
    - thisisnico 7y ago
      The status quo had changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. Anything can happen.
  - setr 7y ago
    I disagree -- software development is more fashion-driven than the fashion industry itself. Programming languages are simply interfaces into a particular tech stack. The stacks will shift as the trends come and go, and the languages will go with it. Perhaps the lowest levels of the stack have settled nice and snugly, with little hope for displacement except by extreme measures (cpu archs, kernel/os implementations, etc) but the higher layers are still rapidly changing, and dragging along new languages with them.
Saad_M 7y ago
The real question is whether a programming language that has lost traction, mindshare, and focus ever gained it back? It's probably no coincidence that Python's rise was at the same time of Perl's stagnation.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  I think what happened to Perl is that its approach (puns, whimsy, ornate symbols, multiple ways to do the same thing) suddenly became extremely unfashionable with the rise in popularity of more clean and simple languages like Python and Ruby (although Ruby had a much more whimsical US community in the past, it's not part of the core language community in the same way.) Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like it's coming soon.
  - brnt 7y ago
    I don't think those things became unfashionable, it was just not what people who were until then (late 90ies) not programmers were looking for. They were looking to get shit done (tm) and verbosity (Java) or clarity (Python) suited what they were looking for much better than Perl (a clever language for clever programmers).
    - s_kilk 7y ago
      I think that's a large part of it, yes, but a lot of folks saw the demented weirdness of perl and were (rightfully) turned off. And by that time there were sane alternatives available.
  - Scarbutt 7y ago
    Well, Ruby has Rails and it is still declining very fast, it's very hard to seen it come up back again, Perl has no chance.
    - joelbluminator 7y ago
robviren 7y ago
I cannot tell if this is satire or not.
- kdmccormick 7y ago
  As with many things Perl, it's tounge-in-cheek. Yes, they want to increase Perl adoption. No, they probably don't think they can realistically meet all those goals in the forseeable future.
stone-monkey 7y ago
A lot of people shitting on the website in this thread, but it seems to me like you guys are missing the point - this isn't a site targeted towards people who aren't using it currently - it's a site targeting the true believers to give them more concrete actions they can take to help spread the faith.
- pimmen 7y ago
  If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today, the site deserves the criticism.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today It does - for example it talks about a project to make Perl faster.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      > a project to make Perl faster. That’s respectable and worthwhile regardless, but I don’t think performance was a major factor in Perl’s decline. If I start a project right now in Python instead of Perl, it will have absolutely nothing to do with Perl not being fast enough. That is to say, I doubt performance improvements of Perl 5 will help much in regaining ground.
- oefrha 7y ago
  While there are some actionable pieces of advice on the page, a large percentage is misguided and if taken seriously would simply waste already strained resources. Mobile apps and 3D games in Perl 5? Might become someone’s toy, but good luck finding any adoption... Perl 5 taught in every high school? Give me a break...
- mst 7y ago
  The true believers are using perl. Neither rperl nor cperl is compatible with perl at this time, and the authors of both didn't so much burn their bridges as dynamite them on the way out of the mainstream community. If it was simply what you thought it was, I'd be in favour. Instead, it's a cynical attempt to capitalise on the raku rename and draw off support from actual perl users to their weird-ass not-exactly-perl projects :(
draw_down 7y ago
I guess I don’t see the point. Ruby and Python fit the bill okay.
cafard 7y ago
"In the past, Perl applications could be found on most computers." I'm not sure I could fill a bus if I located every programmer in my area who ever used Perl on a PC. But as someone points out the tone of the page appears to be tongue-in-cheek. On the other hand, I think "(worse yet) Java" would make a great .sig line.
- alecmg 7y ago
  Have used Parl at its height. After studying Java and C courses Per felt like a language I can finally do something useful without boilerplate. And for simple text processing it was fast enough. But then codebase grew... Switched to Python and never looked back past 15 years. Please let Perl die
7thaccount 7y ago
There was a discussion on this a week ago in the Perl subreddit where some key community members (Ex: Ovid) chime in. I think it is a good plan to make Perl faster, but I'd rather they pitch in and help Johnathan Worthington with the Perl6 (now Raku) effort. Perl5 is a good language, but there isn't enough to get me to switch from Python. Raku on the other hand is very cool and I can see the benefit. Edit: Perl6 (now Raku) isn't just a version change from Perl5, but is an entirely new and powerful language. It seems to have pulled some of the best aspects of Python, Ruby, Perl, and some things from Haskell/Lisp.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> We are now developing the RPerl compiler, which provides startup optimization, serial runtime optimization, automatic parallelization, and memory usage minimization. What would a modern high performance language look like though? I see it at as a language with AOT compilation, high performance implementation of a decent actor concurrency model not shared memory one, vector/matrix abstractions, primitives and operations. At the same time I see automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance.
- dsr_ 7y ago
  There are languages for which it makes sense to try to be the fastest at some set of things: fastest program initialization, fastest network socket library, fastest regular expressions. That's all nice, but in the vast majority of programming work, "fastest learning curve from hello,world to low-error-count CRUD program" is the best spec. Perl actually has a shot at that, but there's nothing much special about it that couldn't be done by Python or Ruby.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance Automatic parallelization hurts high performance? What do you mean - things like throttling when extremely high-end vector instructions are used?
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    No, I mean more generally performance and efficiency of multi core computational models are tightly bound to algorithms and so auto parallelization can only add restrictions on what algorithms can be implemented and what performance can be achieved. Basically the same problem many languages have that try to use more cores, instead of pursuing higher performance, and of course end up slow.
dotdi 7y ago
Is this satire?
- efa 7y ago
  I'm not sure. The external links (ex: http://teenperl.com http://teenperl.com, http://perlscouts.com http://perlscouts.com) are not real sites. If it's real, its very sad. Hard to get fired up and believe Perl can be relevant in the modern world via a ridiculous website that looks like a bad amateur job.
  - lizmat 7y ago
    Amateur job is the right description. No, alas, it is not satire, far from it. :-(
orf 7y ago
> The certificate is only valid for the following names: packages.rperl.org, phpmyadmin.cloud-web0.autoparallel.com I hope step 1 is to get a working TLS certificate. Edit: Oh, I see. https serves the wrong site...
skzo 7y ago
First Step: get TLS certificate
- julienfr112 7y ago
  lol. No excuse, you can even do that in perl : https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE
theonemind 7y ago
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
djhaskin987 7y ago
This was always the problem of Perl: it tried to be all things to all people: > * Perl as the fastest language > * Perl as the most popular language You can't get the fastest language (assembly) and be the cognitively easiest and most popular language (Python), there's a trade-off there. This is why Python won: it focused on what was most important for ease of maintainability and readability and left out everything else
- twunde 7y ago
  Honestly python won in large part because perl took over a decade to come out with perl 6. Knowing that there was a backwards-incompatible upgrade on the horizon shortly and having that be true for a decade meant that new projects in perl or major upgrades in perl were delayed and then shifted to projects in other languages. Python and ruby both were beneficiaries of this (especially with PHP going through a similar process with PHP 6 which took 5 years before being abandoned.)
  - sblom 7y ago
    Cough. Python 3. Cough. (I don't dispute the majority of your point, but I don't think all 10 year, backwards-incompatible upgrades are created equal.)
    - twunde 7y ago
      Agreed. The main difference is that development of python 3 didn't stop development on the 2.x branch until 3.4(?) was out. There was also an upgrade path and the ability to support both Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time. Python 3 could _easily_ have been a similar roadblock but was handled well enough to avoid that fate (better upgrade tooling would have been a massive help)
ineedasername 7y ago
Of course to reverse the trend Perl needs more programmers etc., but Perl for its own sake isn't really a compelling argument. The question really isn't "What's required to make Perl a more common language?" The question is, "Why should anyone choose Perl over another option?" Certainly there's a "best tool for the job" approach that might suggest Perl for certain applications, but most of the time developers are saddled with using a single language for a task. Like choosing a hammer: You'd like to choose the one best suited for a job, but that job requires driving both 20d framing nails and brads and everything in between. Carrying an 18oz for the framing, a 10oz for the brads etc. isn't practical, so you choose the 18oz because it's the only one that will work for framing and you can still use the 18oz for the brads, you just need to use a light touch and be more careful. All that said, I take it this article may not be entirely serious. If it had not been written by Larry Wall, I might take it as complete satire, as examples of the exact wrong reasons to champion a language.
- clscott 7y ago
  To be clear, this was NOT written by Larry Wall. It was written by Will "the Chill" Braswell, author of a perl fork called `RPerl.` He is not speaking for the general Perl community
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. The presentation is a bit misleading then-- it has Larry's picture & name at the top, looking like a byline, and I don't see any other obvious author except at the very bottoms where two people are listed as "endorsements"
    - lizmat 7y ago
      Will Brasswell has a long history of appropriating other peoples images / volunteering other people, even to the point of submitting talk proposals for people at conferences without their knowledge or consent. I've asked him to remove all mentions of Raku on his site (as Raku is no longer part of the Perl future), but he has refused to do so. It's http://perl11.org http://perl11.org all over again, but with improved graphics and UI. But it's still the same sour wine.
totalperspectiv 7y ago
Here is a link to the discussion on Reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_masterplan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_maste... It's worth reading. What I think it is is a power / money grab by a small group inside Perl. It's not reflective of the goals or desires of the wider Perl community. Or at least those goals and desires would not be presented in this way.
eb0la 7y ago
Perl is #1 in Advent (perladvent.org). I've been following Perl Advent for a looong time. The sad art is I don't code Perl anymore (at least 10-12 years) but I still visit perl advent every year. Let's see what happens this year :-)
cutler 7y ago
On my Macbook Pro parsing a 19Mb log file with a regex using the latest Perl 6 (Rakudo 2019.3) takes 8.3 times as long as Perl 5 and 5.1 times as long as Ruby 2.7, excluding startup time. Text processing is what made Perl famous so I can't see Perl 6 having a cat-in-hell's chance until performance improves significantly.
- 663e1b 7y ago
  The OP is about Perl 5 not Raku (formerly known as perl 6)
- smhenderson 7y ago
  These guys are using mostly Perl 5 though. They basically forked 5 years ago and call it Perl 11. They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11 comes from 5+6=11). AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku and drop the link to 6 and let Perl 5 continue as it was with new development instead of Perl becoming a completely new language. Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5. I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.
  - gorgonical 7y ago
    I think that's part of this push, that Perl 6 is gonna become Raku, so that Perl 5 is just Perl again. Then I think Perl 11 is an aspirational interpreter/VM that will allow both to run, as was originally intended. I do see your point though.
    - lizmat 7y ago
      This push did not involve any consultation with any community. He has never contributed anything to Perl 6, let alone Raku. He continues to use Larry's image and calling him a "saint", without his consent. He does not listen to other people. In other words: he's doing Perl the worst possibly favour.
zelly 7y ago
If you want your language to win, all you need is Google to adopt it in one of their products. Apparently that's all that matters.
a3n 7y ago
Godspeed. But for one of the goals, Python just seems more immediately accessible to "non-programmer" technical people for whom programming is merely a means to a non-programming end. I used to use Perl decades ago. I can barely read it anymore.
mhd 7y ago
This is from the Perl11 guys, right? So, not exactly the Perl mainstream, if such a thing exists these days. (Not saying that they're entirely wrong)
smnplk 7y ago
Haha, didn't read the post, the title alone gave me enough laughs.
jackmaney 7y ago
> Currently, most new apps are written in Objective-C, JavaScript, Python, Java, and dozens of other so-called "fad languages". Holy shit, please tell me that this is satire.
spicyramen 7y ago
I started using Perl back in 2007 for their text parsing capabilities, then moved to Python as more and more examples and libraries became available, I definitely enjoy both.
cestith 7y ago
This is not a master plan. This is not The Perl Foundation. This site and these people do not speak for the Perl community or its core developers. The whole site is run by Will Braswell, the creator and maintainer of RPerl, and Reini Urban, the creator and maintainer of CPerl. Both are increasingly troublesome to the Perl community. Rather than apologizing and reintegrating to the community, they've decided to start their own separate community where they are the leaders without disclosing the fact that they are speaking for this new, separate party.
- snapdangle 7y ago
  Thank you for raising this very significant detail to the comment section!
  - bloke_zero 7y ago
    It reads like a spoof, like if Paul McCartney wrote a manifesto for why he should be considered the cutting edge of rock.
- jjcc 7y ago
  Thanks. I strongly suggest constructive competition which will benefit all of us. In addition to that, I also suggest that somebody can have a high order review of how the dispute evolved so a better protocol can eventually developed to make an eco-system healthier. Or even more, study the weakness of human nature so a more efficient cooperative system can be created by promoting awareness of troublesome behaviors/features.
  - mst 7y ago
    There was a half decade of attempts at turning this into constructive competition with cross-pollination, mostly conducted quietly between principals to maximise the chances of it working out usefully. None of said attempts worked out, as you can see.
- mst 7y ago
  Let me confirm this, except more so. Will and Reini have effectively been cut out of the main line perl community for repeatedly being assholes to anybody who dared to disagree with them about anything (and I mean being assholes by my standards, which I hope at least some readers will recognise as a rather high bar to clear). When the website was first created there was a ripple across the social media presences of assorted significant perl/cpan people, myself included, decrying it, though it's non trivial to search for because most of us deliberately didn't include the URL to avoid signal boosting its existence any more than strictly necessary. The general consensus among my fellow cpan authors (including core team members of some of the most widely used projects) is basically a superposition of 1) "Oh for fuck's sake, not them again" and 2) "The only way this could've been more tone deaf and counter productive is if instead of a 'master plan' they'd called it a 'final solution'" There's lots of things happening of late that I'm very optimistic about. This shit is basically the Tulsi Gabbard of perl futures. I respect the right of the authors to hold their opinions, but I respect nothing about said opinions and would encourage everybody else not to feed the trolls. -- mst, deeply unimpressed by this shit
gshdg 7y ago
What might put Perl back on top (or at least no longer at the bottom) would be a really awesome modern web application framework.
- rubinelli 7y ago
  Dancer is actually really nice, but that ship has sailed.
- pre_action 7y ago
  That's Mojolicious
LessDmesg 7y ago
Thanks, I've had a good laugh. As for Perl, it's dead and that is good. Python fits the bill just nicely. Now if only Python could replace Javascript so there would be one language less to learn...
Jenz 7y ago
This is the first time I’ve ever read anything which left me thinking ‘it may be satire’ ... Be it satire or not (which I think it actually isn’t), this is not a good sign.
leibnitz27 7y ago
Aside from all the other excellent points about the motivations behind this group - this one sentence on the website is really a very silly move : 'Currently, most software courses teach either Python or (worse yet) Java'. If you're trying to show that a language is good, don't slag off other languages just for the sake of it. At best it makes unjustified suppositions. At worst it makes you look like a bitter zealot.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Except PHP. Hating on PHP is practically a meme at this point.
  - gremlinsinc 7y ago
    Sure, but PHP's got it's shit together lately. It's actually grown w/ the times and isn't the POS it was a decade ago w/ the 4/5 versions. 7 and soon version 8 are a lot faster, more secure, and w/ composer/laravel and the ecosystem a lot easier to build apps in. That said it's not always perfect. There's definitely something to be said of building the entire stack in JS simply because then devs only need know JS... Or use something like elixir because of performance needs. I think hating on PERL is more of a meme than hating on PHP, and in some circles hating on JS is just as popular a meme... I mean JS is a nightmare sometimes esp. the tooling/build setups but it accomplishes things not many other languages can. Though rust+web assembly might be interesting way to skip js, but learning curve is a bit high on rust.
deftturtle 7y ago
Never written a line of perl in my life, but this seems like total satire. They talk about “machine learning” trends and apps and putting classes in “every school.” It’s exaggerated and funny. Check out their linked site, “Teen Perl,” which has nothing but a splash page. http://teenperl.com/ http://teenperl.com/
sli 7y ago
I am really confused. Are we taking this obvious joke as though it's a serious website making serious claims? Everyone seems to be discussing this as though it's actually real and not a joke.
rocono 7y ago
I for one welcome our new Perl overlords
rocono 7y ago
I for one welcome our new Perl overlords.

Perl Master Plan

72 points by mmoez 7y ago

throwanem 7y ago

This is a great bit! This is a bit, right?

rchaves 7y ago

why? It's never explained why

jhfdbkofdcho 7y ago

I love Perl, but this is delusional

lizmat 7y ago
Indeed. Especially when you realize this is only the first of many sites Will Brasswell wants other people to make: perlpackages.com perlcontainers.com perlvm.com perlclouds.com perlaccessibility.com perlinstall.com perlgames.com perloffice.com perlapps.com perlservers.com perlgrandchallenges.com perlhackathons.com spacescouting.org perlscouts.com certifiedyouthprogrammer.com programmingmeritbadge.com mlperl.com scienceperl.com perldemos.com perljobs.work perllegacy.com perlpodcasts.com perlvideos.com perlbrochures.com perlflyers.com perlmerchandise.com perlpapers.com perlnewsroom.com perlblogs.com perlinfographics.com perlbeer.com perlparties.com perlconferences.com perlmulticore.com perlsupercomputers.com perlspeed.com perlfamily.org

martythemaniak 7y ago

This is great. But what is it?

cestith 7y ago
TL;DR: this is the manifesto of a self-selected maintainer of a largely incompatible fork who has growing delusions of usefulness. This is a splitter's manifesto of what he's going to do right where he blames everyone else for shortcomings he's done little to nothing to help overcome. He's too egotistical and toxic to get any work merged into the mainline project, so he has decided to lead from outside the established community and separate from the established foundation. He's a technically quite competent developer who can't work well with others. He speaks for himself and claims broad support and calls his ramblings a master plan, implying that he's a master planner for the whole community. Most of his plans don't even involve Perl mainline or Raku. He's pushing his own RPerl and Reini Urban's CPerl both of which depart from the Perl code base. He does this while calling others stupid and difficult and repeatedly violating the CoC of The Perl Foundation online and at several major events (including repeated harassment over gender, gender identity, sexuality, physical disabilities, and his perceptions of other people's moral obligations and shortcomings under his religion). During the recent Perl6 to Raku rename, when the plan was to create a new Facebook group for Raku and direct visitors to the Raku group from the Perl 6 group, he unilaterally renamed the Perl 6 group to reflect the name change. So we had two Raku groups and no group for people to find it by the old name and be redirected. All the old posts to the Perl 6 group were now in the newly renamed Raku group. Since a group can only by renamed every so often, the fresh Raku group was renamed by the founder of the group to be "Perl 6" for discoverability and aimed at the old, original group now named "Raku" but with posts predating the name change talking about Perl 6. Rather than apologizing when the difficulty he caused was pointed out, he claimed nobody would look under the old name during the transition period and he was doing everyone a favor with his rash actions since the founder of both groups hadn't rushed headlong into the same decision. He also has a history of using images and other assets without permission or even attribution. He claims t if something isn't watermarked with a copyright he's in the clear, which is obviously false on its face in any Berne Convention country. Then he wonders why he gets disinvited and nobody wants to work with him on merging his work upstream. So since everyone else isn't playing by his rules, he has apparently decided to once again apply his own rules to everyone else and claim to speak for The Perl Foundation and the larger Perl community despite no mandate at all to do so.

smacktoward 7y ago

This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what Perl needs: more Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a language are the ways that language satisfies what users and developers need. If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.

pressurefree 7y ago
ya he has pearl vision lol... needs to get his i's checks
agentultra 7y ago
Have tried this with Common Lisp and Haskell. I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the right time and app/platform exclusivity. That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo.
- ghaff 7y ago
  >I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo. That sounds a bit the end of progress. After all, Go, Rust, and Swift haven't been around for that long. I might be open to an argument that ecosystem effects (libraries, training, etc.) lead to power law effects. But I'm not sure I believe that. I could equally well believe that the sheer scale of software development today lends itself to a lot of viable niches.
  - thisisnico 7y ago
    The status quo had changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. Anything can happen.
- setr 7y ago
  I disagree -- software development is more fashion-driven than the fashion industry itself. Programming languages are simply interfaces into a particular tech stack. The stacks will shift as the trends come and go, and the languages will go with it. Perhaps the lowest levels of the stack have settled nice and snugly, with little hope for displacement except by extreme measures (cpu archs, kernel/os implementations, etc) but the higher layers are still rapidly changing, and dragging along new languages with them.

Saad_M 7y ago

The real question is whether a programming language that has lost traction, mindshare, and focus ever gained it back? It's probably no coincidence that Python's rise was at the same time of Perl's stagnation.

chrisseaton 7y ago
I think what happened to Perl is that its approach (puns, whimsy, ornate symbols, multiple ways to do the same thing) suddenly became extremely unfashionable with the rise in popularity of more clean and simple languages like Python and Ruby (although Ruby had a much more whimsical US community in the past, it's not part of the core language community in the same way.) Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like it's coming soon.
- brnt 7y ago
  I don't think those things became unfashionable, it was just not what people who were until then (late 90ies) not programmers were looking for. They were looking to get shit done (tm) and verbosity (Java) or clarity (Python) suited what they were looking for much better than Perl (a clever language for clever programmers).
  - s_kilk 7y ago
    I think that's a large part of it, yes, but a lot of folks saw the demented weirdness of perl and were (rightfully) turned off. And by that time there were sane alternatives available.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Well, Ruby has Rails and it is still declining very fast, it's very hard to seen it come up back again, Perl has no chance.
  - joelbluminator 7y ago

robviren 7y ago

I cannot tell if this is satire or not.

kdmccormick 7y ago
As with many things Perl, it's tounge-in-cheek. Yes, they want to increase Perl adoption. No, they probably don't think they can realistically meet all those goals in the forseeable future.

stone-monkey 7y ago

A lot of people shitting on the website in this thread, but it seems to me like you guys are missing the point - this isn't a site targeted towards people who aren't using it currently - it's a site targeting the true believers to give them more concrete actions they can take to help spread the faith.

pimmen 7y ago
If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today, the site deserves the criticism.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today It does - for example it talks about a project to make Perl faster.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    > a project to make Perl faster. That’s respectable and worthwhile regardless, but I don’t think performance was a major factor in Perl’s decline. If I start a project right now in Python instead of Perl, it will have absolutely nothing to do with Perl not being fast enough. That is to say, I doubt performance improvements of Perl 5 will help much in regaining ground.
oefrha 7y ago
While there are some actionable pieces of advice on the page, a large percentage is misguided and if taken seriously would simply waste already strained resources. Mobile apps and 3D games in Perl 5? Might become someone’s toy, but good luck finding any adoption... Perl 5 taught in every high school? Give me a break...
mst 7y ago
The true believers are using perl. Neither rperl nor cperl is compatible with perl at this time, and the authors of both didn't so much burn their bridges as dynamite them on the way out of the mainstream community. If it was simply what you thought it was, I'd be in favour. Instead, it's a cynical attempt to capitalise on the raku rename and draw off support from actual perl users to their weird-ass not-exactly-perl projects :(

draw_down 7y ago

I guess I don’t see the point. Ruby and Python fit the bill okay.

cafard 7y ago

"In the past, Perl applications could be found on most computers." I'm not sure I could fill a bus if I located every programmer in my area who ever used Perl on a PC. But as someone points out the tone of the page appears to be tongue-in-cheek. On the other hand, I think "(worse yet) Java" would make a great .sig line.

alecmg 7y ago
Have used Parl at its height. After studying Java and C courses Per felt like a language I can finally do something useful without boilerplate. And for simple text processing it was fast enough. But then codebase grew... Switched to Python and never looked back past 15 years. Please let Perl die

7thaccount 7y ago

There was a discussion on this a week ago in the Perl subreddit where some key community members (Ex: Ovid) chime in. I think it is a good plan to make Perl faster, but I'd rather they pitch in and help Johnathan Worthington with the Perl6 (now Raku) effort. Perl5 is a good language, but there isn't enough to get me to switch from Python. Raku on the other hand is very cool and I can see the benefit. Edit: Perl6 (now Raku) isn't just a version change from Perl5, but is an entirely new and powerful language. It seems to have pulled some of the best aspects of Python, Ruby, Perl, and some things from Haskell/Lisp.

zzzcpan 7y ago

> We are now developing the RPerl compiler, which provides startup optimization, serial runtime optimization, automatic parallelization, and memory usage minimization. What would a modern high performance language look like though? I see it at as a language with AOT compilation, high performance implementation of a decent actor concurrency model not shared memory one, vector/matrix abstractions, primitives and operations. At the same time I see automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance.

dsr_ 7y ago
There are languages for which it makes sense to try to be the fastest at some set of things: fastest program initialization, fastest network socket library, fastest regular expressions. That's all nice, but in the vast majority of programming work, "fastest learning curve from hello,world to low-error-count CRUD program" is the best spec. Perl actually has a shot at that, but there's nothing much special about it that couldn't be done by Python or Ruby.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance Automatic parallelization hurts high performance? What do you mean - things like throttling when extremely high-end vector instructions are used?
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  No, I mean more generally performance and efficiency of multi core computational models are tightly bound to algorithms and so auto parallelization can only add restrictions on what algorithms can be implemented and what performance can be achieved. Basically the same problem many languages have that try to use more cores, instead of pursuing higher performance, and of course end up slow.

dotdi 7y ago

Is this satire?

efa 7y ago
I'm not sure. The external links (ex: http://teenperl.com http://teenperl.com, http://perlscouts.com http://perlscouts.com) are not real sites. If it's real, its very sad. Hard to get fired up and believe Perl can be relevant in the modern world via a ridiculous website that looks like a bad amateur job.
- lizmat 7y ago
  Amateur job is the right description. No, alas, it is not satire, far from it. :-(

orf 7y ago

> The certificate is only valid for the following names: packages.rperl.org, phpmyadmin.cloud-web0.autoparallel.com I hope step 1 is to get a working TLS certificate. Edit: Oh, I see. https serves the wrong site...

skzo 7y ago

First Step: get TLS certificate

julienfr112 7y ago
lol. No excuse, you can even do that in perl : https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE

theonemind 7y ago

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html

djhaskin987 7y ago

This was always the problem of Perl: it tried to be all things to all people: > * Perl as the fastest language > * Perl as the most popular language You can't get the fastest language (assembly) and be the cognitively easiest and most popular language (Python), there's a trade-off there. This is why Python won: it focused on what was most important for ease of maintainability and readability and left out everything else

twunde 7y ago
Honestly python won in large part because perl took over a decade to come out with perl 6. Knowing that there was a backwards-incompatible upgrade on the horizon shortly and having that be true for a decade meant that new projects in perl or major upgrades in perl were delayed and then shifted to projects in other languages. Python and ruby both were beneficiaries of this (especially with PHP going through a similar process with PHP 6 which took 5 years before being abandoned.)
- sblom 7y ago
  Cough. Python 3. Cough. (I don't dispute the majority of your point, but I don't think all 10 year, backwards-incompatible upgrades are created equal.)
  - twunde 7y ago
    Agreed. The main difference is that development of python 3 didn't stop development on the 2.x branch until 3.4(?) was out. There was also an upgrade path and the ability to support both Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time. Python 3 could _easily_ have been a similar roadblock but was handled well enough to avoid that fate (better upgrade tooling would have been a massive help)

ineedasername 7y ago

Of course to reverse the trend Perl needs more programmers etc., but Perl for its own sake isn't really a compelling argument. The question really isn't "What's required to make Perl a more common language?" The question is, "Why should anyone choose Perl over another option?" Certainly there's a "best tool for the job" approach that might suggest Perl for certain applications, but most of the time developers are saddled with using a single language for a task. Like choosing a hammer: You'd like to choose the one best suited for a job, but that job requires driving both 20d framing nails and brads and everything in between. Carrying an 18oz for the framing, a 10oz for the brads etc. isn't practical, so you choose the 18oz because it's the only one that will work for framing and you can still use the 18oz for the brads, you just need to use a light touch and be more careful. All that said, I take it this article may not be entirely serious. If it had not been written by Larry Wall, I might take it as complete satire, as examples of the exact wrong reasons to champion a language.

clscott 7y ago
To be clear, this was NOT written by Larry Wall. It was written by Will "the Chill" Braswell, author of a perl fork called `RPerl.` He is not speaking for the general Perl community
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. The presentation is a bit misleading then-- it has Larry's picture & name at the top, looking like a byline, and I don't see any other obvious author except at the very bottoms where two people are listed as "endorsements"
  - lizmat 7y ago
    Will Brasswell has a long history of appropriating other peoples images / volunteering other people, even to the point of submitting talk proposals for people at conferences without their knowledge or consent. I've asked him to remove all mentions of Raku on his site (as Raku is no longer part of the Perl future), but he has refused to do so. It's http://perl11.org http://perl11.org all over again, but with improved graphics and UI. But it's still the same sour wine.

totalperspectiv 7y ago

Here is a link to the discussion on Reddit a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_masterplan/ https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_maste... It's worth reading. What I think it is is a power / money grab by a small group inside Perl. It's not reflective of the goals or desires of the wider Perl community. Or at least those goals and desires would not be presented in this way.

eb0la 7y ago

Perl is #1 in Advent (perladvent.org). I've been following Perl Advent for a looong time. The sad art is I don't code Perl anymore (at least 10-12 years) but I still visit perl advent every year. Let's see what happens this year :-)

cutler 7y ago

On my Macbook Pro parsing a 19Mb log file with a regex using the latest Perl 6 (Rakudo 2019.3) takes 8.3 times as long as Perl 5 and 5.1 times as long as Ruby 2.7, excluding startup time. Text processing is what made Perl famous so I can't see Perl 6 having a cat-in-hell's chance until performance improves significantly.

663e1b 7y ago
The OP is about Perl 5 not Raku (formerly known as perl 6)
smhenderson 7y ago
These guys are using mostly Perl 5 though. They basically forked 5 years ago and call it Perl 11. They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11 comes from 5+6=11). AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku and drop the link to 6 and let Perl 5 continue as it was with new development instead of Perl becoming a completely new language. Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5. I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.
- gorgonical 7y ago
  I think that's part of this push, that Perl 6 is gonna become Raku, so that Perl 5 is just Perl again. Then I think Perl 11 is an aspirational interpreter/VM that will allow both to run, as was originally intended. I do see your point though.
  - lizmat 7y ago
    This push did not involve any consultation with any community. He has never contributed anything to Perl 6, let alone Raku. He continues to use Larry's image and calling him a "saint", without his consent. He does not listen to other people. In other words: he's doing Perl the worst possibly favour.

zelly 7y ago

If you want your language to win, all you need is Google to adopt it in one of their products. Apparently that's all that matters.

a3n 7y ago

Godspeed. But for one of the goals, Python just seems more immediately accessible to "non-programmer" technical people for whom programming is merely a means to a non-programming end. I used to use Perl decades ago. I can barely read it anymore.

mhd 7y ago

This is from the Perl11 guys, right? So, not exactly the Perl mainstream, if such a thing exists these days. (Not saying that they're entirely wrong)

smnplk 7y ago

Haha, didn't read the post, the title alone gave me enough laughs.

jackmaney 7y ago

> Currently, most new apps are written in Objective-C, JavaScript, Python, Java, and dozens of other so-called "fad languages". Holy shit, please tell me that this is satire.

spicyramen 7y ago

I started using Perl back in 2007 for their text parsing capabilities, then moved to Python as more and more examples and libraries became available, I definitely enjoy both.

cestith 7y ago

This is not a master plan. This is not The Perl Foundation. This site and these people do not speak for the Perl community or its core developers. The whole site is run by Will Braswell, the creator and maintainer of RPerl, and Reini Urban, the creator and maintainer of CPerl. Both are increasingly troublesome to the Perl community. Rather than apologizing and reintegrating to the community, they've decided to start their own separate community where they are the leaders without disclosing the fact that they are speaking for this new, separate party.

snapdangle 7y ago
Thank you for raising this very significant detail to the comment section!
- bloke_zero 7y ago
  It reads like a spoof, like if Paul McCartney wrote a manifesto for why he should be considered the cutting edge of rock.
jjcc 7y ago
Thanks. I strongly suggest constructive competition which will benefit all of us. In addition to that, I also suggest that somebody can have a high order review of how the dispute evolved so a better protocol can eventually developed to make an eco-system healthier. Or even more, study the weakness of human nature so a more efficient cooperative system can be created by promoting awareness of troublesome behaviors/features.
- mst 7y ago
  There was a half decade of attempts at turning this into constructive competition with cross-pollination, mostly conducted quietly between principals to maximise the chances of it working out usefully. None of said attempts worked out, as you can see.
mst 7y ago
Let me confirm this, except more so. Will and Reini have effectively been cut out of the main line perl community for repeatedly being assholes to anybody who dared to disagree with them about anything (and I mean being assholes by my standards, which I hope at least some readers will recognise as a rather high bar to clear). When the website was first created there was a ripple across the social media presences of assorted significant perl/cpan people, myself included, decrying it, though it's non trivial to search for because most of us deliberately didn't include the URL to avoid signal boosting its existence any more than strictly necessary. The general consensus among my fellow cpan authors (including core team members of some of the most widely used projects) is basically a superposition of 1) "Oh for fuck's sake, not them again" and 2) "The only way this could've been more tone deaf and counter productive is if instead of a 'master plan' they'd called it a 'final solution'" There's lots of things happening of late that I'm very optimistic about. This shit is basically the Tulsi Gabbard of perl futures. I respect the right of the authors to hold their opinions, but I respect nothing about said opinions and would encourage everybody else not to feed the trolls. -- mst, deeply unimpressed by this shit

gshdg 7y ago

What might put Perl back on top (or at least no longer at the bottom) would be a really awesome modern web application framework.

rubinelli 7y ago
Dancer is actually really nice, but that ship has sailed.
pre_action 7y ago
That's Mojolicious

LessDmesg 7y ago

Thanks, I've had a good laugh. As for Perl, it's dead and that is good. Python fits the bill just nicely. Now if only Python could replace Javascript so there would be one language less to learn...

Jenz 7y ago

This is the first time I’ve ever read anything which left me thinking ‘it may be satire’ ... Be it satire or not (which I think it actually isn’t), this is not a good sign.

leibnitz27 7y ago

Aside from all the other excellent points about the motivations behind this group - this one sentence on the website is really a very silly move : 'Currently, most software courses teach either Python or (worse yet) Java'. If you're trying to show that a language is good, don't slag off other languages just for the sake of it. At best it makes unjustified suppositions. At worst it makes you look like a bitter zealot.

dehrmann 7y ago
Except PHP. Hating on PHP is practically a meme at this point.
- gremlinsinc 7y ago
  Sure, but PHP's got it's shit together lately. It's actually grown w/ the times and isn't the POS it was a decade ago w/ the 4/5 versions. 7 and soon version 8 are a lot faster, more secure, and w/ composer/laravel and the ecosystem a lot easier to build apps in. That said it's not always perfect. There's definitely something to be said of building the entire stack in JS simply because then devs only need know JS... Or use something like elixir because of performance needs. I think hating on PERL is more of a meme than hating on PHP, and in some circles hating on JS is just as popular a meme... I mean JS is a nightmare sometimes esp. the tooling/build setups but it accomplishes things not many other languages can. Though rust+web assembly might be interesting way to skip js, but learning curve is a bit high on rust.

deftturtle 7y ago

Never written a line of perl in my life, but this seems like total satire. They talk about “machine learning” trends and apps and putting classes in “every school.” It’s exaggerated and funny. Check out their linked site, “Teen Perl,” which has nothing but a splash page. http://teenperl.com/ http://teenperl.com/

sli 7y ago

I am really confused. Are we taking this obvious joke as though it's a serious website making serious claims? Everyone seems to be discussing this as though it's actually real and not a joke.

rocono 7y ago

I for one welcome our new Perl overlords

rocono 7y ago

I for one welcome our new Perl overlords.