Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

I think it's also time to just call it on Perl 5: It's a dead end: no one can work with the internals unless you're a wizard, and getting the porters to decide on any large features is impossible (function signatures, anyone?), and the, "experimental" pragma is broken.

Is it still useful? Damn right it is, but there's not going to be a Perl 5++.

Speaking as someone who's been writing Perl since oh, 1997 or so. So another multi-decader (and no plans of stopping) - where do we all meet? At the bar?

View on HN

I don't think working on the perl5 internals is quite as hard as you make it sound. Yes, there's brittle dependencies between many parts. Yes, it's a very complex piece of software (and in intrinsic and implementation specific ways). But the single biggest barrier for Perl devs to hack on it is that most of them aren't also great C programmers. To wit, I'd tried many times to get the hang of it as a Perl dev and struggled. After I learned C properly for unrelated reasons, the nextb attempt went swimmingly. I've also seen folks show up on the porters list and get up to speed in just a few weeks.

Now, I'll concede the point regarding language design though: the Perl 5 Porters have become very conservative wrt language evolution. I used to be highly skeptical of this (I convinced folks of strict by default in 5.12 and oh how much I lobbied behind the scenes for fully @_ eschewing function signatures!) but since we made a number of blunders in such changes in the decade prior, I understand the conservativism.

I don't mind conservative changes to the language honestly. Knowing that what you get is what you get is quite empowering. But I'm not going to confuse and lie to myself into thinking there's going to be massive new features in any new version of Perl (5). That's what Perl 6 was supposed to be, but "Perl 6" isn't Perl and that's not a great thing, as choices to add to my tool box just puts Perl 6/Raku in line against Python, Ruby, Scala, Java, etc, etc, etc. I'm not saying anything new... that's the existential crisis created by not having backwards compat. Does Perl 6/Raku seem AWESOME?! Yeah; but not production-ready.

The idea of extending things via modules in Perl 5 was a great one, but there's a limit on what you can without features guaranteed to be in core. I also get the idea that keeping the core small is probably a good one (by not shipping every module in the world), and keeping the language opinionated (by letter you select just what type of meta-object system you want, but after a while, it doesn't seem like these things help with architecting a future for the core language.

So it goes, I suppose.

Rurban is working on modernizing Perl 5, eg http://perl11.org/cperl/perlclass.html

It is doubtful this will ever be backported into the official distribution, because $drama...

It will not, given the current culture war, but perl5 will just die off, and cperl is the replacement. esp. when it will be 2x faster.

mst doing some interesting work with babble, a babel for Perl 5. Hoping we get a typescript workalike in Perl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com