Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

I also like Perl, and it's common on Linux. My issue is that perl 5 is obsolete, and perl 6 isn't included in most distros.

View on HN

How exactly is Perl 5 obsolete?

Perl 5.30 just came out in May. So it is still actively being maintained and improved.

Perl 5 is included by default in most Linux distros and there are Perl distributions available for all major operating systems and platforms. (See http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html for the comprehensive list.)

Obsolete != Trendy / popular

I just mean that it's not the latest version of perl (now that perl 6 exists).

Perl 6 is also Perl, but Perl 5 was the glue of the Internet with millions of lines of Perl 5 code written and still in use.

Perl 6 was a bit slow to start and has not seen wide adoption. With Python, Ruby, and now even Powershell as scripting competitors, people have more options and aren't choosing it as much.

Perl 5 was an easy choice when it was practically a standard part of LAMP stacks via mod_perl in the Apache web server. Now there are so many backend web server choices you can pretty much use any major programming language.

I don't think Perl 6 will displace Perl 5. Perl 5 may even out last Perl 6.

Really Perl 6 and Perl 5 are different languages. I think even maintainers see it as that, please correct me if I'm wrong. I believe there was a discussion about renaming Perl 6 to avoid this confusion.

That's factually incorrect. Perl 6 also known as Raku is an unrelated language. The latest version of Perl is 5.30.0 as shown on http://www.perl.org/.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com