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Announcing Perl 7

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

MrPlow writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Boy, you sure taught me. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @06:17PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @06:17PM (#1014620)

  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.

  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:

  1. In the dot com boom, people who were not bright enough to properly operate a toaster were writing production code, and it happened to be in Perl. Perl gained a bad reputation because of the spaghetti messes they left behind. It was just timing, if Java or Python was the hot language during the dot com boom then they would be getting lots of hatred today. (Well, Java is already pretty widely loathed. Python is generally liked or at the most gets an indifferent reaction everywhere except from Perl mongers.)
  2. Perl6/Raku was so different from previous Perl editions it should have been a separate language from the beginning. Because it wasn't, a lot of companies put existing Perl work and new Perl projects on hold in the early 2000s because they were waiting for Perl 6. A lot of momentum was lost. I love Perl6/Raku, but as much as the technical features are brilliant the marketing and transition plan were a disaster.
  3. Perl is so forgiving that in many cases TIMTOWTDI is actually TALALOWTDOI (there are lots and lots of ways to do it) and it makes the learning curve steep enough to hurt adoption. And while most Perl users don't care on an individual level whether any particular novice decides to learn Perl, on an industry level fewer new users leads to fewer new projects and job opportunities in the language we love.

  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.

  Parent