Recently, P5P is arguing about the future development of Perl. As a long-term user of Perl (but not a core developer), I also have some ideas of my own.

The first and most important question is, what are Perl's real capabilities / advantages? sigil？ Regexp? On some degree, yes, but not exactly. Perl's real power lies in its expressive power and self-evolvement. Language is language, and computer language is also a kind of language (although many people don't realize it now). The purpose of language is to communicate and express what they want to express. At the beginning of Perl language, Larry learned from many excellent functions of the language, so it can let people express what they want quickly accurately, which is the real reason why Perl stands on the river. So I conclude below by learning history of other languages(including human languages):

1. When the language can't deliver what it wants to deliver quickly, there will be fewer and fewer users stay there, such as COBOL, lisp, Latin (human language), even if they have many bright spots.
2. Without users, the language will die. In history, many languages have died out, they may have many advantages and characteristics, but now these characteristics may exist in other languages, but they themselves have died out.
3. The language needs to quickly implement the features it needs, not whether it is elegant or not. Think about Japanese, Chinese, and even English. In the long history, they constantly learn from other languages to implement some new concepts. These implementation may conflict with their own, but it doesn't matter. As long as they can quickly accurately deliver these new concepts to achieve the purpose of communication, the language will not die. Languages that have been slow to implement new functions for the sake of elegant implementation (or because of lack of manpower) have all died out.

Let's go back and see how Perl should do? In recent years, Perl supporters have said that the advantage of Perl is CPAN (stand on the shoulder of cpan). what does it really mean? It means that Perl also has all the functions and libraries which other languages have(though there is maybe not in Perl itself)

Unfortunately, I personally feel that the core developers of Perl seem to have lost the direction of Perl(perhaps because of the stepdown of Larry?). They are addicted to deprecate the old functions instead of adding new functions and facilitating cpan developers. This leads to several severe problems to perl:

1. More and more modules on cpan are not available, and even many authors give up their own modules because they want to adapt to new changes
2. Because XS and its toolchain are too specific to C language and Perl, it is difficult for people who are not familiar with Perl to develop interface libraries. Think about UV, such a popular library needs people like PEVANS to maintain.
3. Due to the lack of new functions or new libraries, Perl has fewer new users, such as GUI and parallel programming. This is a vicious cycle. Due to the lack of language functions and the complexity of language level, fewer and fewer people use Perl. Therefore, there are fewer and fewer heavyweight modules in cpan, resulting in fewer and fewer people using Perl. It should be understood that the difficulty of learning the language itself is never the first thing for users, but the function is. As long as you have the features users want, no matter how difficult, they will learn.

I admit that due to the lack of core developers, it is more and more difficult for Perl to implement new functions. Thus, I think the short goal of core developers should be how to make it convenient for cpan authors, especially some tools for quickly borrowing features/libraries from other languages. Imagine the real language, there are many words in English, which are borrowed directly from French, Japanese and many more. Some words have never been officially deprecateded. But the real function is used naturally, the bad function is put there, the user slowly becomes 0!

To sum up, I suggest that the core developers of Perl should be able to focus on (of course, this is only my personal wish) redesigning and implementing a language layer for communication with other languages. The current XS and its toolchain are too limited to C and obscure which makes it difficult for the user to develop such an interface.

In addition, the layer between languages should not be limited to compiled languages, but also include virtual machine languages and other specifications(consider how many ppl on windows use Win32::OLE). Because we are short of developers, when a new popular application or library appears in other languages, it may be difficult for us to have the corresponding Perl version very quickly. If there is a convenient way to establish a conversion layer at this time, so that Perl users can stay in the Perl world happily, I think it is great incentive for the use of Perl! FFI:: Platypus does very well. I hope it can enter the official package when it's mature. but I also want it could be more ambitious. to introduce more virtual machine languages, including C sharp, node.js , GO, etc. Inline:: XX may also be a direction, but it seems too duplicated to need to write its parsers for each language.

Of course, in the long run, of course, P5P can slowly polish the Perl language itself, maybe including type system, object system, better regexp, concurrency programming, etc. but it should be noted that language and its new features need to be learned by users. First of all, users should stay in Perl, without users, language and its features can not prove whether they are useful or not.

UPDATE:

Thanks for Discipulus, GrandFather pointing out my various English mistakes. ;)