I get the downvotes, but have to agree. Perl 5 has an ecosystem and a feature-complete language. It works well in it’s niche of gluing together Unix utilities. Is there genuinely a change to Perl that the Perl community thinks is necessary for it’s continuing legacy, or; is Perl 8 an attempt to make architecting new, large programs in Perl a more justifiable decision?
The question “What do we [the Perl community] need for Perl 8?”, when I’m sure Perl programmers are satisfied with Perl or they’d long have moved on - so maybe the question should be “Do we need Perl 8?”
The question is fairly simple at this point: Are there changes that can be made to Perl that are beneficial and do not make the situation worse than it already is? My answer is: No. For portability reasons, if you’re a library or utility developer, you can’t even use any new Perl feature for at least 10+ years, because that’s how long it will take before you can guarantee (?) that the new version of Perl has been widely enough distributed that your code taking advantage of the new feature will work. Perl is absolutely ubiquitous. Perl’s a nightmare, but it is a hugely successful nightmare (in terms if its ubiquitous distribution), and that success boxes it in quite tightly. Much as I don’t have any love for Raku, at least they didn’t make those changes and call it Perl 6. The only reason to use Perl at this point is either (i) you learned it 30 years ago and stopped progressing after that, or (ii) you are using it because it’s ubiquitously present wherever your code has to run. If the former, please don’t punish others for your choices, and if the latter, then you probably can’t get any value from Perl changing, and the changes will probably hurt you (because you’ll have to be very careful to avoid them, or anything downstream that relies on them).
Whence Perl? :-)
Wherefore Perl?
Dear God, please make it stop.
I get the downvotes, but have to agree. Perl 5 has an ecosystem and a feature-complete language. It works well in it’s niche of gluing together Unix utilities. Is there genuinely a change to Perl that the Perl community thinks is necessary for it’s continuing legacy, or; is Perl 8 an attempt to make architecting new, large programs in Perl a more justifiable decision?
The question “What do we [the Perl community] need for Perl 8?”, when I’m sure Perl programmers are satisfied with Perl or they’d long have moved on - so maybe the question should be “Do we need Perl 8?”
The question is fairly simple at this point: Are there changes that can be made to Perl that are beneficial and do not make the situation worse than it already is? My answer is: No. For portability reasons, if you’re a library or utility developer, you can’t even use any new Perl feature for at least 10+ years, because that’s how long it will take before you can guarantee (?) that the new version of Perl has been widely enough distributed that your code taking advantage of the new feature will work. Perl is absolutely ubiquitous. Perl’s a nightmare, but it is a hugely successful nightmare (in terms if its ubiquitous distribution), and that success boxes it in quite tightly. Much as I don’t have any love for Raku, at least they didn’t make those changes and call it Perl 6. The only reason to use Perl at this point is either (i) you learned it 30 years ago and stopped progressing after that, or (ii) you are using it because it’s ubiquitously present wherever your code has to run. If the former, please don’t punish others for your choices, and if the latter, then you probably can’t get any value from Perl changing, and the changes will probably hurt you (because you’ll have to be very careful to avoid them, or anything downstream that relies on them).
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/gary-larson--590956782357522967/