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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 29 2020, @08:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the out-with-the-old,-in-with-the-new dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

This morning at The Perl Conference in the Cloud, Sawyer X announced that Perl has a new plan moving forward. Work on Perl 7 is already underway, but it's not going to be a huge change in code or syntax. It's Perl 5 with modern defaults and it sets the stage for bigger changes later. My latest book Preparing for Perl 7 goes into much more detail.

Perl 7.0 is going to be v5.32 but with different, saner, more modern defaults. You won't have to enable most of the things you are already doing because they are enabled for you. The major version jump sets the boundary between how we have been doing things and what we can do in the future.

Remember, Perl was the "Do what I mean" language where the defaults were probably what you wanted to do. In Perl 4 and the early days of Perl 5, that was easy. But, it's been a couple of decades and the world is more complicated now. We kept adding pragmas, but with Perl's commitment to backward compatibility, we can't change the default settings. Now we're back to the old days of C where we have to include lots of boilerplate before we start doing something:
[...]
This is slightly better with v5.12 and later because we get strict for free by using setting a minimum version:
[...]
Perl 7 is a chance to make some of these the default even without specifying the version. Perl 5 still has Perl 5's extreme backward compatibility behavior, but Perl 7 gets modern practice with minimal historical baggage.

Source: https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/


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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @01:25PM (6 children)

    I care about it. It deeply comforts me that Perl 6 was given the boot. It took all the ease and utility goodness of Perl and Python'd it into a cocktacular mess.

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  • (Score: 2) by dmbasso on Monday June 29 2020, @01:41PM (5 children)

    by dmbasso (3237) on Monday June 29 2020, @01:41PM (#1014062)

    If it had "Python'd" as you said, the language would be successful, as Python 3 is. But in actuality, Perl is not even a blimp in the radar, with less than 1% usage.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday June 29 2020, @02:53PM (4 children)

      by RS3 (6367) on Monday June 29 2020, @02:53PM (#1014095)

      Not to be argumentative, but imho very little in computing is successful because it's truly better. Non-technical business people often make the decisions about what technologies to use, often completely at odds with technical staff. Those idiots wouldn't tell their plumber or auto mechanic which tools to use, but they'll tell their engineers which tools to use.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by dmbasso on Monday June 29 2020, @06:42PM (3 children)

        by dmbasso (3237) on Monday June 29 2020, @06:42PM (#1014203)

        Except you'll notice that Python is also used for personal projects in a much higher ratio relative to Perl.

        But my point was about the "Python'd" as derogative... sure, the Python 3 release could perhaps have been handled better, but after the initial friction the language has been adopted and is successful - and that was certainly by its merits. Otoh, take a crappy language and try to polish it somehow, and you'll not get that same result. Ofc you can say my use of the word "crappy" is subjective, but that's my experience... the only language worse than Perl I used in the 30 years since I started programming was Authorware's built-in scripting (back in 1994). I could add BASIC as worse than Perl too, but fortunately I never had to anything professionally with it. :p

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        • (Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 29 2020, @09:04PM

          Except you'll notice that Python is also used for personal projects in a much higher ratio relative to Perl.

          Yes, because it's trendy and easier for idiots. I am not an idiot though and am going to use the best tool for the job.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday June 29 2020, @09:06PM (1 child)

          by RS3 (6367) on Monday June 29 2020, @09:06PM (#1014250)

          Absolutely, all good points. I have a friend who refers to certain things as "polished turd".

          Again, really don't mean to be argumentative, but I know that when I see the business market (job ads) is driving a specific technology, I develop interest. If it's difficult or annoying, it might become a personal challenge to deal with it. It's all part of me trying to accept a reality I really hate: non-technical business-types making the decision about what tools I should use. And yes, it has been a big problem for me in my professional life.

          I've done some BASIC professionally! Way back when 1) I knew BASIC, and 2) it was included in IBM PCs and Macintoshes. I even wrote an FFT and plotting algorithm. But the fun BASIC was for an industrial control system's PLC. There were pressure and temperature monitor instruments that had an RS-232 port. BTW, I didn't design nor spec out any of this stuff. Anyway, there was a PLC module that ran BASIC and had a serial port, so my sw "talked" first to a code operated switch- you just sent a string that told the switch which port to switch to, and then my code gave commands to the selected pressure or temperature instrument, then received the data, and put it into PLC memory. It ended up being a very complex task because someone else had started the project. I assume they had quit the company- I never really knew. It was the most horrible spaghetti code ever written. There were long variable names that were only ever used once, and "i" for a major global. Anyway, their code never worked, and was far too slow. Somehow it hit me, and I ran experiments to prove it, that if you did any kind of branch / jump / goto, the stupid interpreter started at line zero and scanned through everything, every time. So I did as much loop-unrolling, and anything that really needed to loop or be a frequent subroutine was at the top, and init code was the very bottom. The line-number scanning stupidity was never documented.

          And I've done some VB and frankly I don't hate it but ironically had huge trouble getting serial port stuff to work...

          • (Score: 2) by dmbasso on Monday June 29 2020, @09:58PM

            by dmbasso (3237) on Monday June 29 2020, @09:58PM (#1014274)

            Nice stories, thanks for sharing! It made me recall that I actually used BASIC professionally, but nothing really interesting (as your cases are). I made some interactive graphics materials for an "intro to computers" course I lectured back in 92 or 93. I used Borland's Turbo Basic to compile them; it was really nice to have small executables, specially in comparison to Clipper's output (the language that I used most at that time).

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