Perl 7 Announced As Evolving Perl 5 With Modern Defaults

[timofonic]

Call me a weirdo if you all want, but I find Raku to be a lot more interesting than Perl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(...mming_language) What do you all think?

[schmidtbag]

complete and utter rubbish

monkeys love peanuts tho...

Well, I don't love peanuts, and monkeys tend to sling crap for no good reason.

[Raka555]

People can look down on Perl all they like, but it was miles ahead at the time.
Over the years the other languages "acquired" most of the cool stuff that Perl brought to the table.
Whole new languages like PHP and Ruby was inspired by Perl.

It is still one of the fastest interpreted languages around.

It is still my go to language for small stuff when my boss tells me "Just get it done". But other languages has caught up with Perl in terms of expressiveness.

I lost my taste for all interpreted languages for more serious work. The end product always end up slow and bloated.

You can almost always count on Perl being available on any system, except windows.
If python is there, its always the wrong version ...

[rhavenn]

There was someone who used to write everything in Perl at my workplace. Such a PITA, since unlike languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, shell scripting, etc, you can't just read Perl and get the gist of how to work with it. You really have to go out of your way to understand it. Very often, me or someone else would just re-write something from scratch in a different language because it isn't worth our time to learn it.

That's not a problem with Perl. You CAN write completely obfuscated code and Perl certainly has some quirks and shortcuts to make it easy to do that, but if you don't use those syntax shortcuts then it's no worse than reading any other language.

[willmore]

Perl 6 was an ambitious effort to transorm Perl, but it went out of control and ran into the Wall.

[Raka555]

That's not a problem with Perl. You CAN write completely obfuscated code and Perl certainly has some quirks and shortcuts to make it easy to do that, but if you don't use those syntax shortcuts then it's no worse than reading any other language.

This made me think of the 7 line DVD decoder in Perl

[MadeUpName]

I will be writing Perl till the day I die. I can get so much done so fast and I love the syntax. I absolutely despise any language that depends on indenting like basic and Python.

[schmidtbag]

That's not a problem with Perl. You CAN write completely obfuscated code and Perl certainly has some quirks and shortcuts to make it easy to do that, but if you don't use those syntax shortcuts then it's no worse than reading any other language.

That's a double-edged sword. The shortcuts may be great for those who know the language, but that's also it's greatest weakness to anyone who doesn't know the language.
IMO, programming languages are best when they're easy to read.

[Raka555]

That's a double-edged sword. The shortcuts may be great for those who know the language, but that's also it's greatest weakness to anyone who doesn't know the language.
IMO, programming languages are best when they're easy to read.

Easy to read languages are less expressive (less powerful) by definition.

Perl is different enough from other languages that you probably won't be able to read it without knowing the language.

I read the Camel book cover-to-cover on day 1 and never looked back. Perl feels very natural since then.

I guess few people will have enough incentive to do that today.

[Raka555]

Someone made a study some years ago about computer language expressiveness and Perl was 1st among the then Tier 1 languages: