Some recent trends away from Perl are due to cleanliness of the language (well, I don't get this -- I love Perl -- but anyway).... I predict the Python and Ruby hype machine to be well countered by Perl6, though --- if Perl6 can get out fast enough Python and Ruby will never attain "peer" status.

I'm gonna risk the downvotes here.

While Perl 6 will clean up some of the ugliness of Perl's syntax (no more @{$array_ref} stuff, etc.). It seems to me that they are adding alot of new operators, and in particular Unicode operators ( see Peir's summary about this here ). Maybe when the dust settles this will be a good thing, and clarity will reign supreme. But I am very wary of languages with weird character sets, I mean if this was a good thing, we would all be programming in APL.

Now I love Perl as much as the next monk, but I also realize why other people don't like it. And I see too that when it comes to clarity of code, Python is really really nice. They don't call it "executable pseudo-code" for nothing. But you can't do the same 3-weeks-worth-of-work-in-one-line scripts you can do in Perl in Python, its just not that "expressive".

Don't be worried about Perl's future. I'd be worried if you were a fan of Forth or Pascal or Cobol. Perl?

Pascal, maybe, but I would hesitate to call COBOL dead. Yeah it sucks as a language, and I highly doubt that there are any new COBOL projects in the works, but there is ALOT of existing COBOL code out there, and that code needs to be maintained. Just look at the work on COBOL.NET (by Fugitsu) to see that its not dead (old, crochety and with a severe case of senility maybe, but not dead).

As for FORTH, its certainly not a widely used langauge, but its also not dead. You would be hard pressed to find another language that can fit into some of the places where FORTH can, its tiny and endlessly extensible. It tiny footprint and fast execution speed make it ideal for small embedded microproccessors with limited memory, you can't say that about Perl/Python/Ruby/etc. Weird, but not dead, its a niche language thats all.

Perl is still alive and well for sure, and PHP (IMO) is just an ugly stepchild of Perl. But PHP is a niche language like FORTH, its ideally suited to small to medium-scale web applications. Perl on the other hand is more of a "general purpose" programming language. PHP may edge it out of the "slap-a-quick-web-site-together" market one day, but who cares, there is still alot of other places Perl lives and works in that PHP will likely never go.

Perl is Dead! Long Live Perl!

As for FORTH, its certainly not a widely used langauge, but its also not dead.

Every single modern Apple (PPC) and Sparc machine contains the "open boot" ROM, and that's programmed in (and extended with) FORTH. If that's "not a widely used language", I wonder what you consider "widely used".

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

I stand corrected! I did not know this, and here I had thought it was just used to control large telescopes, the Canon Cat and Lego Robots :)

-stvn

... highly doubt that there are any new COBOL projects in the works

Then prepared to be surprised ;-) There are a heck of a lot of new COBOL work in the works. I know a couple of people doing COBOL development work and they're continually in work - a lot of it new code (and they're paid very well for it too).

According to this little list of COBOL facts Gartner are predicting that 15% of new code in 2005 will be in COBOL.

Wow, no doubt Grace Hopper is smiling in her grave right now. While I guess I am really not that surprised, but I am afraid,.... very afraid ; P

-stvn

Be very surprised!

Certainly within the financial services sector thorughout the western world COBOL is still king. I can think of several Cobol shops I know of that have upwards of 50 programmers each. One, with over 120 runs a COBOL school of their own to take programmers and train them in COBOL. One friend of mine, a project manager working on large COBOL jobs, was asked by a mutual friend who is a C++ project manager why he was earning so much. The answer was pretty obvious, "I am in demand, you are just one of very very many".

jdtoronto

Actually, I very much hope that I can use Python and Ruby alongside Perl6 via Parrot. In fact, I'd love to see a version of a Java compiler that can target Parrot, too. That way I can choose each language based on its merits alone and not just because it needs to integrate with a larger application that is written only in language x.

I doubt Cobol is going away any time soon. If you've still got Cobol code laying around, it's because it's mission critical and you don't dare replace it with a solution that doesn't have 20+ years of debugging behind it like your current Cobol code does. You don't keep Cobol around because you want to, but because you have to. I don't see how Parrot will change that.

There likely will be a version of a Java compiler that can target Parrot. However Parrot does not consider all languages equal. It considers highly dynamic languages as first class citizens, and all other languages will pay overhead whether or not it makes sense for them. This means that Java running on Parrot will be far slower than Java running on a traditional JVM.

Therefore while it is an interesting proof of concept, people will only run Java on Parrot if they really, really have to.

You're definitely right about the (probably huge) speed loss, but don't forget that parrot-compiled languages will be able to use each other's libraries. So, even though I couldn't imagine anyone running a pure-java app on parrot, I could see a lot of people wanting to take advantage of the huge number of Java libraries out there.

It considers highly dynamic languages as first class citizens, and all other languages will pay overhead whether or not it makes sense for them.

The .NET Common Language Runtime is pretty much the other way around. It seems much better suited to more static languages. I suspect that Java would more likely migrate there than Parrot. It will be interesting to see when Parrot is finished how it will compare against the CLR.

-stvn

FYI -- my comments on Cobol were about a language that had no room to go. I did not imply that Perl was going to some how take share from Cobol, or Forth.

I wanted to mention Lisp and Smalltalk as languages that weren't really growing too -- but many folks still use those. Plus, I was trying to avoid a flamewar with any AI professors that might post here :) It's blatantly obvious TONS of folks still use Cobol.

Languages never really die. They just cease to grow. That's what I meant when discussing Cobol and Forth.

Considering COBOL was one of the first major languages to be ported to .NET, I would really hesitate to say that is has "no room to grow". Don't get me wrong I have no love for COBOL, but i think that COBOL.NET and all the work done modernizing COBOL during the Y2K "crisis" have actually given it a lot of "room to grow". Sure, the hacker community isn't gonna start writing COBOL versions of Slash and COBOL-nuke or anything, but it a language that was designed for business managers not programmers, and who knows, business managers may cause a revivial (oh lord I hope not), dumber things have been done in the name of commerce.

To say too that FORTH has no room to grow, hmmm, FORTH being FORTH, and therefore being (just about) infintely extensible. I would really hesitate to say that. There are likely more dialects of FORTH out there than grains of sand on a beach. As long as there are electrical engineers and micro-code, there will likely be some form/derivative of FORTH.

Now as for LISP, oh boy, again the language is so extensible that it would never cease to have "room to grow". Take Paul Graham for instance, he wrote the original engine for Yahoo! Stores in LISP (see this for some detail). LISP begat Scheme too, which is used in a lot of places to teach CompSci. LISP (and dialects of LISP) is also the primary language used by Cycorp, which recently got some big DARPA contracts to build "terrorist information databases" and "threat anaylsis tools" (I will not get into politics here, but suffice to say this is some of the coolest and scariest stuff out there right now).

I will agree with you that Smalltalk is kinda "lost in the woods" and seems to maybe have lost some of its old footholds to Java. But it still remains a favorite amoung researchers, so one never knows what will happen.

Languages never really die. They just cease to grow. That's what I meant when discussing Cobol and Forth.

But if they are still alive, and if enough smart people are still using them (sometimes against thier will), they will always grow. COBOL had to grow of we would have been fixing the Y2K problem with punchcards instead of modern IDEs.

-stvn

I released a partially finished JVM -> PASM translator to the p6-i mailing list several months ago. It was mostly complete as far as opcodes are concerned, but I couldn't really test it as parrot didn't have real object support at the time. Of course, it does now, so maybe I *should* finish it...