jjn1056

Exploring what a modern, async-first server interface could look like in Perl, building on lessons from PSGI/Plack and newer ecosystems.

Cool to see scientists and researchers using Perl this way

It all still works tho :)

I'm totally not waiting. This isn't the first time Perl6 has been 'production ready' It wasn't all those years ago, and won't be in Jan 2016 either. No jobs, no deep libraries, no SDK support... The list is unending. If we'd put 1/10 the time into minor improvements to perl5 over the past 15 years we'd have most of what people seem to like about Perl6 in a language you can actually get a job. Instead we have two languages with no future instead of one...

Historically, Perl6 was supposed to be the next version of Perl (replace Perl5). There was a plan for Perl5 and Perl6 to share a new virtual machine and for there to be some sort of compatibility layer so that Perl6 could run Perl5 code. However when it started to take decades to complete Perl6, and when it started to become clear that Perl6 was so different from Perl5 that it was essentially a new language, working Perl5 developers started working on Perl5 again and porting as many Perl6 features as possible to Perl5 (although typically not as new minor versions of Perl5, but as modules on CPAN). So for example we have Moose which brings a lot of the best bits of Perl6 objects to Perl5. As a result many Perl5 programmers stopped waiting to be saved by Perl6 and just got on with it. Over time the distance between Perl5 and Perl6 communities grew, despite some efforts at unification, so that now the fact that both languages share the Perl name is a bit silly (in my opinion, but I know that's not universally shared). In fact there's been moments of hostility between the communities, over the Perl name and so forth. So sorry this is confusing to you, you are rightly confused and it saddens me that it happened. I wish that when it became clear that Perl6 was not replacing Perl5 that we'd have chosen a new name for Perl6. Unfortunately the groups running this are not democratically chosen people to represent the Perl community, just people that showed up and did work, so they often don't feel or care about the confusion. What I usually do is consider Perl5 the language and the version is 22 (the current release of Perl5), and I think of Perl6 as being alpha or beta for version zero. If you consider the number part of the language title it sorta can make some sense.

I would say its sorta like what Apple did, except Perl5 is still production ready and in active development. Although Perl6 has the Perl label for historical reasons and out of respect to Larry Wall, Perl5 and Perl6 are considered distinct languages by their respective communities and each has an independent development track. Even after Perl6 considers itself version 1 complete, Perl5 will continue to be worked on, and in fact it will continue to be the only version of Perl with a full library of tools and jobs available.

Amazing how many people just slap a keyword search interface on their site and call it a day... They'd be better off pointing at Google rather than rolling a crappy home grown solution.

and I want to add, I am so looking forward to having this exact conversation 5, 10 and 20 years from now...

It has uses. Sometimes you can also use it to write code that runs like a script if called in script mode (what some people are calling a modulino. If you really hate it there's a number of packages on CPAN to make it disappear.

Also new versions of Perl allow you to define a package scope and skip the '1;' Most Perl programmers don't use this yet since the benefit is very small and the cost is losing some back compatibility. Maybe in a few years it will be more common:

package MyApp::Web { ... }

Like a lot of things in Perl it has a use that might not be immediately evident. Its also possible a more elegant solution could have been found as well. Generally when I write real code I never notice it (the 1; is drowned out by docs and real code.

Not sure what 'winning is'... I've had a great career in Perl so far and every company I've worked at has been a startup using Perl (not old legacy code). So that's like almost 20 years and every year someone says, "Perl is dead", etc. And every year I just have a blast programming Perl. I've met a ton of great people and I enjoy contributing to open source. So I would say quite complaining about something you personally don't like and get on with doing something useful.

You know Perl gets hassled because of the variable sigils, but when I've taught Perl to newcomers it didn't seem to be much on an issue. Maybe this is because Modern Perl tends to be more clean and OO, there's not the sigil busyness you might see in old Perl code used by admins in the mid 1990's. I think this is really just something people that use other languages are bothered by. I know we all have preferences. When I do Javascript I tend to miss the sigils a bit :)