6 ms·

Aren't you missing advances in programming language technology (performance, tooling, instrumentation) by sticking with such an old interpreter?

kamaal 4y ago
There's quite a bit of legacy running in our industry. Most of it is not even Perl. Think Java, Jquery, and even Python(2.x) these days. Most shops don't have the budgets for total rewrites, or even partial and gradual rewrites. The way old things die, is that new projects don't get started in those languages. To that end, Perl is something of the past already. It is still a very useful technology for a lot of Unixy work on adhoc tasks. But I doubt people learn Perl the way, they learn Python these days. Older people(including me), call upon Perl for lots of work even till date. This is similar to how people continue to use vim/emacs despite things like vscode. There is always going to be a audience for these tools. But the crowd moves on.
mfontani 4y ago
Perl gets new releases on a yearly cadence. We're now at 5.36 IIRC. A far cry from 5.8 or even 5.10. The new releases usually come with bug fixes, speed-ups, additions to the core language, optional syntax features, etc. The only way one gets to use an "old" interpreter is if they're stuck on an old OS release (i.e. RHEL?) and/or they don't build their own version and use the "system" Perl.
- jsymolon 4y ago
  >stuck on an old OS release (i.e. RHEL?) and/or they don't build their own version and use the "system" Perl. I build my containers and put Perl right in them. Makes the container a little chubbier but no outside dependencies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rrwo 4y ago
No. The Perl interpreter has been regular updated and improved. There's a new release of Perl every six months, and the libraries on CPAN provide access to various other kinds of technology and tooling.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Doesn't even have a basic JIT does it? Still using a 90s-era basic interpreter and GC architecture. And there's only one implementation. Doesn't seem very healthy.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Python (or at least, the implementation used 99% of the time in the real world) doesn’t have a JIT either, so this property isn’t limited to niche, dying languages.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Well yeah compare to Python - Python has multiple alternative implementations, an active academic and industrial research community coming up with new ways to improve performance and add tooling, including revolutionary work such as meta-tracing, has new GC work, has a couple of JITs depending on what tradeoffs you want, new explorations into specialising interpretation. Perl doesn't seem to have anyone making this kind of effort? You're stuck with the tech from decades ago.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    The implementation is open source and not owned by a for-profit company that could decide to kill it off in the future. This is a good thing, because it means that we don't have to worry about a program running on one implementation vs another. Also, one of the things that Perl is great for (unlike many other scripting languages) is backwards compatibility. A program written in the 1990s for Perl 5.004 will probably run with minimal modifications on Perl v5.36.
    - 4y ago

kamaal 4y ago

There's quite a bit of legacy running in our industry. Most of it is not even Perl. Think Java, Jquery, and even Python(2.x) these days. Most shops don't have the budgets for total rewrites, or even partial and gradual rewrites. The way old things die, is that new projects don't get started in those languages. To that end, Perl is something of the past already. It is still a very useful technology for a lot of Unixy work on adhoc tasks. But I doubt people learn Perl the way, they learn Python these days. Older people(including me), call upon Perl for lots of work even till date. This is similar to how people continue to use vim/emacs despite things like vscode. There is always going to be a audience for these tools. But the crowd moves on.

mfontani 4y ago

Perl gets new releases on a yearly cadence. We're now at 5.36 IIRC. A far cry from 5.8 or even 5.10. The new releases usually come with bug fixes, speed-ups, additions to the core language, optional syntax features, etc. The only way one gets to use an "old" interpreter is if they're stuck on an old OS release (i.e. RHEL?) and/or they don't build their own version and use the "system" Perl.

jsymolon 4y ago
>stuck on an old OS release (i.e. RHEL?) and/or they don't build their own version and use the "system" Perl. I build my containers and put Perl right in them. Makes the container a little chubbier but no outside dependencies.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rrwo 4y ago

No. The Perl interpreter has been regular updated and improved. There's a new release of Perl every six months, and the libraries on CPAN provide access to various other kinds of technology and tooling.

chrisseaton 4y ago
Doesn't even have a basic JIT does it? Still using a 90s-era basic interpreter and GC architecture. And there's only one implementation. Doesn't seem very healthy.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Python (or at least, the implementation used 99% of the time in the real world) doesn’t have a JIT either, so this property isn’t limited to niche, dying languages.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Well yeah compare to Python - Python has multiple alternative implementations, an active academic and industrial research community coming up with new ways to improve performance and add tooling, including revolutionary work such as meta-tracing, has new GC work, has a couple of JITs depending on what tradeoffs you want, new explorations into specialising interpretation. Perl doesn't seem to have anyone making this kind of effort? You're stuck with the tech from decades ago.
- rrwo 4y ago
  The implementation is open source and not owned by a for-profit company that could decide to kill it off in the future. This is a good thing, because it means that we don't have to worry about a program running on one implementation vs another. Also, one of the things that Perl is great for (unlike many other scripting languages) is backwards compatibility. A program written in the 1990s for Perl 5.004 will probably run with minimal modifications on Perl v5.36.
  - 4y ago