Re^2: Why do people say 'Perl' is dead?!?!

[sundialsvc4]

I think that it is “not quite fair,” shall we very-agreeably say, to criticize a language for not being what it isn’t, when what it is is so darned important for so many people.   When a language has been around for as long as Perl has, 100% compatibility with existing code-bases frankly becomes more important than most other considerations.   This is what pays the freight.   The true “warts” of a language, I think, fall out of favor on their own stink.

Now, in the course of a work-week I do find myself shifting between languages like shifting between hats.   But Perl remains for me a known quantity:   it is a beefy power-tool that won’t let me down.   It is very hard to earn a positive reputation if you are a programming language ... let alone keep it for however-many years running.   The many teams who have worked on Perl (and who have built notable CPAN packages) richly deserve full acknowledgment for their masterpiece.   Warts and all.

And I am sure that I will one day say the same thing about Perl-6 ... warts and all.

[chromatic]

The ability to deal with the problem of backwards compatibility has been around since at least 2000, but the will has not been there. What we have instead (the silly feature pragma) had the best of intentions.

The only true solution has to include requiring a version declaration in every file, lest you get whatever the default behavior of the current version.

[Anonymous Monk]

Why do you keep saying Perl 5 is not doing well? I mean Moose and associated stuff is actually doing a pretty great job in taking care of those extensibility problems, aren't they?

Also I think its best to leave Perl 6 folks to themselves. No one know what is going to come out of it. Worse case, all those learnings can be pulled back in to Perl 5.

May be through a more extensible P5 core, we can get all syntax we have in P6 in P5.

[chromatic]

Why do you keep saying Perl 5 is not doing well?

Where did I say that? I think you're reading a lot into specific technical criticisms of Perl 5.

Worse case, all those learnings can be pulled back in to Perl 5.

In 20 years of gradual evolution perhaps. You have to change many, many things, including the basic container/value model and the Perl 5 notion of type morphing, to make a lot of Perl 6 features possible.