

Schwern's perl5i makes Perl 5 awesomer until Perl 6 comes along. (via Perlbuzz) - telemachos
http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl5i/lib/perl5ifaq.pod

======
seldo
I realize it still has its die-hard supporters, but are there really new
developers joining the perl community these days? I'm not trying to start a
flame war here; I would be genuinely interested to know if anybody is starting
a new project in perl -- who hasn't been doing perl for, say, 10+ years
already.

(And yes,I realize that's what this project is trying to fix)

~~~
rubashov
Judging from IRC and perlmonks.org there are tons of newbies trying to do real
work. I gather the growth of CPAN and core contributors indicate growing
growth.

I am genuinely curious where you got your ideas about on perl usage?

Regardless of growth or decline in any of Perl, Python, and Ruby, my opinion
is they're so equivalent it's barely worth discussing them separately. Pick
the one that has the libraries and frameworks you need. It so happens that
<http://search.cpan.org> is the easiest way to check up on libraries for any
of the languages.

Perl6, if they ever pull off a fast and stable release, is another matter.
It's likely to be a game changer. I actually quite dislike this perl5i thing
and the declarex syntax changing modules in general because they needlessly
fragment the language.

~~~
melling
I'm not sure what you mean by equivalent but would all 3 exist if they didn't
have significant differences? Would they have gone off in search of the Holy
Grail with Perl 6 if Perl didn't have a few nasty issues that needed to be
cleaned up. I'm one of those guys who has used Perl for over 10 years. It was
wilting and I'm glad to see some new life being breathed back into it.

~~~
expeditious
> I'm not sure what you mean by equivalent ...

It means that for basic stuff they are pretty much the same. Variables & data
structures (scalars, arrays, mappings), creating and calling functions,
creating and instantiating classes, looping, if/then/else, talking to the
network, talking to the OS, talking to the db, etc. This basic stuff is in all
these languages; the only real differences are in the syntax (and that's not
even very different).

For many programming tasks, you're just doing these basics over and over
again. Any language will work, so you may as well pick one that's got it where
it counts -- modules, since that will make the most difference in how much
extra code you have to write. And Perl wins that competition with the CPAN.

> Would they have gone off in search of the Holy Grail with Perl 6 ...

Thing is, it's not a Holy Grail. It's just the next revision of Perl. Take a
look at some example Perl 6 code online; they've cleaned things up, fixed some
boo-boos, and upon seeing it I expect you'll matter-of-factly say, "oh, yeah,
still looks like Perl :)".

~~~
melling
Perl6 was started in the year 2000. It's a lot more than a rev from 5.08 to
5.12, for example. Can you elaborate on some of the more details? For example,
what concepts from Ruby and Python are they borrowing in Perl6 that don't
exist in Perl5? Wikipedia didn't elaborate.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl6#Goals>

Sure, at some high-level they're all the same, but the devil is in the
details. Just saying they're all the same is specious.

~~~
expeditious
Actually melling, thanks for calling me on that. Thinking more about it, I
think Perl 6 actually has 2 sides: one is the "like Perl 5 but with a number
of things improved/cleaned-up", and the other side (which I neglected to think
about in my post above) is indeed some major and sophisticated changes (many
of which I know little about since I most often use Perl in a simplistic way
-- do this, open that file, process these log files, etc.).

If you have some specific questions, I suggest asking them at
<http://perl6.org/community/irc> , which I've found to be very friendly and
helpful.

------
sreque
I think this CPAN module is a great idea, but is there any team of Perl
programmers that would consent to actually using this? It seems that anyone
who thinks this module is a good idea would already be using a different
language entirely. I say this as someone who in the past year or two has had
to work with a team of Perl coders, and most of them could care less about the
awesomeness that this module has to offer. I couldn't even get them to agree
on a uniform exception-handling strategy! do_blah or die "failz"; was good
enough for them. :)

~~~
phaylon
As a Perl coder: No, we're still using Perl. And Exceptions are pretty common
these days, so I wouldn't blame the experience you had on the language, but
rather on the people.

