

Perl 5.16.0 is out, with 590,000 lines of changes - Terretta
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/msg186903.html

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haberman
590,000 lines of changes is 30x as many lines as Lua's entire source
distribution.

Just thought I'd mention this in light of yesterday's discussion about
simplicity/complexity: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3995185>

~~~
gosub
By the definition from Rich Hickey, lua seems to be optimized for simplicity
while perl is for easiness.

~~~
kabdib
I've been trading-in my habit of writing one-off Perl scripts for writing them
in C#. I just clone a template file containing enough to get a "while(<>) {
... }" equivalent and a vanilla regular expression going -- ninety percent of
what my one-offs need -- and I'm off and coding.

The result is something that may or may not be faster, or clearer . . . but
it's a whole lot easier to debug when something goes wrong.

I learned Perl about a decade ago, and have never felt that plumbing its
depths (references were about as sophisticated as I got) would pay off. (I
won't get into what I think is broken about Perl, because that discussion
definitely won't pay off :-) )

~~~
bloblaw
The open-source visual IDE written in Perl, called Padre, has an excellent
integrated debugger. <http://padre.perlide.org/>.

With the latest version of Padre, I find debugging Perl scripts to be as easy
as C#.

Or you can use the commercial Komodo editor which has another high quality
Perl debugger.

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perlgeek
See <http://search.cpan.org/%7Erjbs/perl-5.16.0/pod/perldelta.pod> for the
list of changes.

And if you want a copy of the announcement where the Unicode characters aren't
broken, visit [http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-
lists/perl5-porters/2012-...](http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-
lists/perl5-porters/2012-05/msg00728.html)

~~~
andreasvc
Speaking of broken, that second link you give doesn't contain a meta tag
specifying the encoding, and the webserver probably doesn't send it either,
because I had to set my browser to UTF-8 manually to see the correct accents.

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draegtun
Nicely related is the video _New features of Perl 5.16_ from the recent Perl
Mova / YAPC::Russia conference...

* video of Pavel Vlasov talk - <http://vimeo.com/42408505>

* slides from talk - <http://www.slideshare.net/fxzuz/perl-516-new-features>

* conference link - <http://perlmova.org/yr2012/>

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tferris
Anyone using Perl for new projects and why?

~~~
Su-Shee
Yes.

Stability, maturity, great backwards compatibility, whipuptitude, a sea of
well-cared mature modules on CPAN, the ease and convience of CPAN itself,
already installed/available everywhere, Unicode support, creativity and
competence of the community, exceptionally good documentation, "the spirit",
MOP via Moose if I want to, rarely gets in my way, scales very well in terms
of "thinking" and "project" (everything from tiny admin-script up to full-
blown financial district application possible), speed, amazing interesting
features in perl 6....

And no, you don't write the same Perl as in 1996 anymore.

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jonathansizz
Congratulations to all involved! They've really got things back on track in
the last several years. Things stagnated somewhat during the 5.6-5.8 era, but
the 5.10 releases brought large positive changes, both to the codebase and to
the development process itself.

Perl is still the go-to language for tasks within its purview (as described by
other commenters here).

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DigitalSea
Perl, the most humble of languages around. A mere 590,000 lines of code
changes.

