"Perl Is Not Dead, It Is A Dead End"

[Stomme poes]

A project to have a somewhat cleaner (not backwards-compatible with Perl4) version of Perl5.


Stevan Little's slides from a talk he gave about his project:
https://speakerdeck.com/stevan_littl...-is-a-dead-end

This is apparently something even core Perl5 devs are looking into. Will be interesting to see what will come of it.

[jshin]

Hi there. My first post and it's negative... I've actually been thinking about this a bunch lately.... I can get flamed for it all I want, but perl is dead, and it's not coming back too much bad memories of the language. I think the window was right when ruby was taking off, but it's kinda too little too late...

It's a fun idea, but I think companies are mostly looking to oust perl in favor of more legit modern programming languages and once they jump ship, they ain't coming back.

[dsheroh]

It's a fun idea, but I think companies are mostly looking to oust perl in favor of more legit modern programming languages and once they jump ship, they ain't coming back.

Congratulations - you have me at a total loss. I don't know how to engage with your unalloyed and unsubstantiated FUD beyond simply saying that it's incorrect and pointing out that these "more legit modern programming languages" are quite happy to borrow from recent Perl work - the most prominent example probably being Joose, a JavaScript meta-object system based on Perl 5's Moose, which, in turn, is based on the Perl 6 object system.

[jshin]

Because someone ported Moose into Javascript, it validates the whole future of a language? It looks like the person who made Joose has his contact email address on cpan. And it looks like Joose hasn't been touched in over a year and it's not like it has some wide adoption. First time hearing about it.

Can you seriously tell me that you see Perl thriving 10 years from now? Now you have me at a total loss for not being able to see the obvious. The fact that this forum is dead dead dead should indicate something should it not?

[dsheroh]

Can you seriously tell me that you see Perl thriving 10 years from now?

I can seriously tell you that Perl is doing much better today than it was 10 years ago, both in terms of the quality of the language and the vitality of the community. I see no reason to expect that trend to change.

The fact that this forum is dead dead dead should indicate something should it not?

*looks at the name of the forum* You mean the Perl and Python forum? If the dead forum means the language is "dead... and it's not coming back", then why aren't you also insisting that Python is pushing up daisies?

More to the point, though, SitePoint is a site on general topics related to running websites, not a dedicated programming forum, so it's not exactly a great place to judge the general vitality of languages. Go take a look at StackOverflow or PerlMonks and you'll find a much larger volume of Perl-related questions posted on either of those sites in a day than SitePoint gets in a month.

[Stomme poes]

I've urged SitePoint to remove the Perl, Python and maybe even Ruby forums for a few years now, seeings how SitePointers seem to have almost zero interest in these languages, regardless of their actual use or popularity. Ruby would be the exception in that SitePoint the company is somewhat active(er) with Ruby stuff and might be ramping Ruby articles and books up a bit more.

Re Perl in general: those using Perl, see it thriving because it's innovating and doing its thing. Those outside Perl don't see any change since 1999. It's an echo-chamber issue.

Found out at FOSDEM that Ada is actually alive, well, being updated, and has a pretty damn active (but small) community around it. I doubt anyone outside of Ada knows this. A search for jobs turns up little. Turns out the place to get Ada jobs is their irc channel. Who knew.

[GryphonFramework]

Have a look at the job boards for Perl jobs.

1,201 jobs containing Perl in Sydney in the last 30 days.

I wouldn't call that dead.

[Stomme poes]

Well, but how many of them are jobs listing 5 other languages at the same time? I don't count those. :P

[GPSpilot]

I'm not going to argue with the statement that Perl is dead; but to help focus my learning efforts, I'm more interested in learning which languages are alive, and how alive are they? Which languages will have strong legs over the next, say, five years?

To make this more fun and informative, let's try to quantify it: list a few languages and rate them on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is "deader than dead," and 100 is "as vibrantly alive as one can imagine!"

Thanks

[John_Betong]

I'm not going to argue with the statement that Perl is dead; but to help focus my learning efforts, I'm more interested in learning which languages are alive, and how alive are they? Which languages will have strong legs over the next, say, five years?

To make this more fun and informative, let's try to quantify it: list a few languages and rate them on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is "deader than dead," and 100 is "as vibrantly alive as one can imagine!"

Thanks

Try this:

Http://langpop.com/

Sad to say not one mention of Prolog which is my favourite language

[GPSpilot]

Ok, C tops the charts at langpop.com. But does it follow that "the language most likely to be vibrantly alive five years from now is C"? That's what I'm really getting at. I'm looking for insight into this question from all you human experts.

Thanks

[Stomme poes]

Perl is certainly going to be around in 5 years. The core Perl5 guys make a (testing) release every 6 months. You know it's testing, development or minor because it's an odd number and minor (like, 5.15.x), whereas stable releases are large even numbers (5.16). 5.16 is the current stable, though by now there's prolly a bug-fix version 5.16.something. A stable release is supported actively for 2 years, and security fixes for 3. A lot of the innovation is porting was-experimental stuff from Perl6 to Perl5, and Perl6 has inspiration from various cool places like Haskell and OCAML, among others.

Perl also has a large, worldwide, vibrant community (and sub-communities, mostly based on geographic location, known as monge(u)r groups) and members are active on places like StackOverflow. CPAN has also been getting some remakes: there's metaCPAN, a better search engine for finding things on CPAN (and one of the filters is activity, to more easily find what's been abandoned vs actively maintained), and cpanminus for easy_install-like builds of modules.

Re the Object system: Larry Wall once said:

I don't really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.

However many didn't like the Perl-version-of-Python-objects present in early Perl 5. People outside Perl don't seem to know it's now got a nice clean OO layer (Moose, Mouse or Moo) if you want, where you can use roles and traits to your liking, and it's got WSGI implementations too, PSGI (usually using Plack middleware between your app and whatever servers).

So I'd say Perl is pretty alive, but the number of developers is dropping, or maybe more accurately, new programmers haven't heard of viable Modern Perl and so there's not the same stream of noobs coming in like some other languages have.