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/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 29 2020, @07:45PM (1 child)
Obviously, the easier accomplishing the tasks you need accomplished. What else?
For example, C certainly can accomplish any task that Perl can; Perl itself is written in C and Perl. However, I learned Perl too as it makes complicated text processing tasks far easier.
CPAN. No abuse of whitespace. Two or three times less writing to do any given thing.
Everything is far easier to learn than C++. And it was made that way incrementally, precisely through NOT "continuing with the status quo".
Market shares are gained by use of marketing tools, not by any objective thing. Perl did not have a deep-pocket corp backer in the time the deep-pocket corps were divvying up the market; Perl lost.
Community-based project do not have the money to burn on promotion, but promotion is the only thing that matters in the real world. Technical merit means nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @06:17PM
That's not the whole story, because Python grabbed a huge share of the market without a corporate backer either. I think Perl lost market share for three reasons:
Perl is still fighting an uphill battle on the first point. The second point is finally resolved now that Raku is separate. I think the third is where there is the most room for progress.