

Pros and cons of releasing Perl 5.20.0 as Perl 7.0.0 - __david__
http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/02/perl-7.html

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pjungwir
I recently took a few years off full-time development to attend grad school,
and whenever I worried about my skills getting out of date I'd tell myself,
"I'll know I've stayed too long if I'm still here when Perl 6 ships." As it
turns out I've been back in full-time development for the last two years, and
it still isn't ready.

Perl was my "first love," but I think almost all developers who would have
adopted Perl 6 have already moved on to Python or Ruby.

~~~
pyre
Or stayed with Perl 5. The last couple of years has seen a lot of development
on the core of Perl 5, and there are a ton of libraries on CPAN to make up for
some of the language deficiencies that would require severely backwards-
incompatible changes to the language.

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rjbond3rd
Recently, I watched someone code in Mojolicious (a remarkable Perl framework).
It was simple, brilliant, elegant and yet felt incredibly lightweight as well
- lots of wow-factor.

But sad to say, most will never see such beautiful things, merely because of
the version number. That's life, I guess.

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obrajesse
"Perl 5" is a programming language. So is "Perl 6". They're sister languages,
not competitors.

This release will be "Perl 5" version 20.

As the guy who was responsible for 5.12 and 5.14, I think this is a horrible
idea. It'd lead to incredible amounts of user confusion and break all sorts of
shit for pretty much no upside other than a version number pissing match with
Perl 6.

~~~
rjbond3rd
And yet, it pains me to say (ouch!), mindshare is a function of version
number. User confusion? It's already out there, in the form of misinformation.

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cpeterso
Perl 6 is a perfect example of both Fred Brooks' Second System Effect and Joel
Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do.

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JoelJacobson
I love the idea, it's time to move on.

Perl5 is God. Perl6 is Jesus who will never ever return to Earth no matter how
much we pray. Perl6, R.I.P.

I care so much more about the existing modules on CPAN, written for Perl5,
than the [insert feature] of Perl6, or any other copy cat languages.

~~~
philwelch
What does that make Perl 7, the Holy Ghost?

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NelsonMinar
I've long since stopped using Perl so forgive my ignorance.. Is Perl 6 widely
understood in that community to be a different language and not the evolution
of Perl? That's what the discussion on this blog indicates. Is the Perl 6
language a dead end or are people enthusiastically working on using it for
production systems? I truly don't mean this question as flamebait, I am
curious what the consensus is in the Perl community.

~~~
chromatic
_Is Perl 6 widely understood in that community to be a different language and
not the evolution of Perl?_

Yes, in part because it's taken so long and delivered so little and in part
because Perl 5's core development picked back up again a few years ago (and
the CPAN never stopped improving).

 _Is the Perl 6 language a dead end or are people enthusiastically working on
using it for production systems?_

The intent of the people working on it is to produce something which will
eventually be usable for serious projects, but no one can give a good
prediction as to when that will happen.

~~~
DASD
Given that specifications such as Unicode, Security and a Standard Library are
examples of the Synopses still "TBD" after all these years, many Perl users
will have retired from programming entirely before Camelia/Perl 6 is "of use."
The fact that major Synopses such as these are left to the end is not
necessarily reassuring either.

<http://perlcabal.org/syn/>

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cjh_
I really think such a move would be overly confusing

* Perl 7 coming out before Perl 6

* Perl 7 being compatible with 5

* Perl 6 being compatible with neither 5 nor 7

~~~
viraptor
But this kind of version skip has some precedents. At least the Winamp "we
messed up 3 so badly that we're going to skip a version" 5, comes to my mind.

~~~
fosap
Is perl 6 messed up? I haven't had the time to look at it, but it doesn't seem
to.

~~~
gchpaco
It would have to get substantially less vapor-y to even qualify as "messed
up".

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vorg
After backporting all of Perl 6's new features into Perl 5, rename it Perl 11
because 5 + 6 = 11.

~~~
fennecfoxen
What does this-here open-source outfit look like to you -- WinAMP?

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PommeDeTerre
I think that going with Perl 7 would be good for the Perl community as a
whole.

The Perl 6 crew has had over a decade to get something useful put together.
While Rakudo is mildly interesting, it isn't practical in the same sense that
Perl 5 is. Given Perl 6's lack of traction, I think it's reasonable to
consider it a dead effort at this point.

Perl 7, on the other hand, would be very usable right away. It would
immediately reflect the changes that we've seen with modern Perl, but without
the stigma associated with Perl 6.

At the very least, it would show that the Perl community is again moving in
the right directly, with the emphasis on a language that is usable today,
rather than on one that has floundered for many years now.

~~~
CJefferson
I strongly agree. I don't follow Perl, but I have long thought "I'll have a
look when Perl 6 gets stable, not a lit off point looking at Perl 5, it's old
and going to disappear soon anyway."

At this point, I suspect the gap which would be filled by Perl for me is
already filled by python. But if I had a firm feeling that Perl 5/7 was not
going to be eclipsed by Perl 6, I would be tempted to give it a try, mainly
because I have found python is not a good replacement for grep/awk/find/xargs,
and I suspect Perl might fit that niche better.

What is the best way to learn "modern Perl"? Or am I better off learning "old
Perl"?

~~~
chromatic
_What is the best way to learn "modern Perl"?_

I wrote a book called Modern Perl. It's freely available in electronic
formats:

<http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl>

~~~
Surio
Going through the online version now. Very pragmatic writing style and wastes
no time in getting to the point (Kernigan/Ritchie influence is seen).

Very nice. Thank you for sharing it with one and all.

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guelo
The consensus forming in the comments to the post seemed to be around the idea
of switching to a year-based versioning system, so Perl 2013. That sounds like
a great idea to me.

~~~
andrewvc
Ugh, that seems terrible. It smacks of compromise, when what the perl
community needs is a fresh set of ideas.

They need to name Perl 6 something else fix the image of Perl 5. Perl 6 should
never have been named Perl anyway, it's a brand new language.

~~~
alex-g
I think it was not clear, for a long time, just how divergent Perl 6 would
turn out to be. If you look back (way back) at the original RFC process, most
people were proposing fairly minor changes to the language; and it was billed
as an opportunity to clean up a lot of cruft at a one-time compatibility cost.
Rather like Python 3, in fact. But then it bit off more than it could chew,
and as you say it is now envisaged as a new language sharing some Perl
heritage.

~~~
andrewvc
That's true, however it's been clear for at least 4-5 years now that Perl 6
was a boondoggle.

From the outside the Perl community looks like its barely holding together.

~~~
pyre
From what I understand a lot of the Perl community mostly ignores Perl 6, and
is focused on the Perl 5 base (as shown by the up-tick in development/changes
on the core of Perl 5).

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bane
why not have even numbered perls be the big language experiments and odd
numbered perls be actual production ones with some of the goodness from the
experiments baked in?

