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Re^10: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks

by 1nickt (Canon)
on Oct 18, 2019 at 11:54 UTC ( [id://11107655]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^9: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
in thread Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks

I was there too, and I think it's only part of the story.

There always has been a small sector among developers/architects/sysadmins who have always known that Perl is vastly superior eg to PHP, and to most languages if your objective is to get a stable working product out the door in the digital era.

Perl never went away and has been in continuous use at all the companies mentioned, forms the back end to my text editor, my DB CLI tool, etc etc. I work at one of the largest internet service providers and Perl has never stopped being at the core of the company, and I am not just referring to the cPanel that we provide to tens of millions of customers around the world. I mean many of our internal APIs, DB layers, etc.

Sure Perl lost some cachet and lots of market share, and there is quite clearly a huge majority of Pointy-Haired Boss -types who parrot out the conventional wisdom that Perl is out of date and ineffective. But that's not reality. Perl has advanced steadily since taking like 8 years to throw out 95% of the stuff that was ill-advisedly stuffed into it during the era when "Perl6" was thought of as a successor to Perl, i.e. around v5.10 to around v5.18.

I believe my friend Your Mother is overstating both the effects of the opprobrobium Perl faces in the real business world, and the benefits of the "contributions" of Liz M and the "Perl6" crew. As someone (chromatic?) said somewhere, "say() and ... ?"

Also it irritates me when there are lots of discussions about what is missing from Perl as if that was an established fact. Some of the folks who keep discussing what's needed in core Perl before e.g. a new version number should be used, should get out into CPAN and the real world and see that there's no blocker whatsoever to building today's software with Perl. There is a first-class OOP system in Moo. There is a first-class signatures/type validation/param checking layer in Method::Signatures (sorry that experimental core stuff is Weak!). There is a first-class concurrency layer in MCE. Etcetera. It is annoying to hear non-Perl people repeating myths about Perl's so-called deficiencies, but even more so when it's Perl people who are saying that because they are so focussed on P5P or whatever that they have not kept up with the state of the arts. Do you think SRI and Jan-Henning and Doug Bell and Joel Berger and the rest of the Mojo crew feel at all constrained by Perl's "missing features"? I know we don't at $work. We build better, more reliable, equally scaleable software in far less time than the teams that are building clients against our APIs in Java or .NET or any other framework.

Perl rules, and it's counterproductive in my view to keep restating the ancient history of the rise of PHP as if it's the current state of things. Perl has recovered from those days and the misguided steps to stuff every notion of new techniques generated by the "Perl6" crew into it. It still suffers from the effects of the missteps, but it's in widespread and growing use in the corporate world in many sectors. We are a smaller fish than we used to be but the pond is a million times bigger.

Bah! When it comes to Perl, the future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

update: s/top-shelf/first-class/, thx hippo


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

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Re^11: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 18, 2019 at 19:10 UTC
    I believe my friend Your Mother is overstating both the effects of the opprobrobium Perl faces in the real business world, and the benefits of the "contributions" of Liz M and the "Perl6" crew. As someone (chromatic?) said somewhere, "say() and ... ?"

    I believe I did say that, but I think that quote is a little misleading. If I recall correctly, the context was "What are the features that were successfully ported from P6 to Perl as-is?" My answer was (and is) say and ... (the yadda operator).

Re^11: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Oct 19, 2019 at 01:05 UTC

    My personal view of Perl does not remotely correspond to the looks of disgust or shock that I get from Java or Python hackers when I say I prefer Perl. The only change heading into 2020 is I get the condescension from Scala, Dart, Go, .NET … programmers too. Perl is used in innumerable places even today. The Perl is dying thing was overblown. Perl cannot die. But like I said, FUD works. Some are shocked to hear that anyone still uses Perl because they heard it’s been dead for years.

    Perl is a fantastic tool, objectively better by many measures than all the high level competition. That said!

    Perl cannot grow. Perl is only in good shape internally in a subset of its former domain and as a legacy language. The bus number on the core devs is far too low. Big data passed Perl by when R said to Python, “Get in the car, loser. We’re going munging.” PHP took the web away from Perl because the community was too high minded and thought modperl was somehow an answer. Mobile blocked Perl’s number early on. Javascript was a fragile, ridiculous tool 20 years ago. It adds advanced features to its core frequently and all class A browsers are keeping up. It’s got the best tool chains and environments now. CPAN, once a wonder of the programming world, is starting to look emaciated and Victorian by comparison. A casual review of github projects and SO questions by language demonstrates my point better than I could.

    I adore Perl. I restate this meta issue only in response. A cessation of retconning Perl5/6 history is all it will take to keep me quiet. Well… quiet about this. :P I do like to go on about this and that from time to time.

    Update: typo.

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