Perl 5.38 Released With Experimental Class Feature, Unicode 15

[panikal]

I thought they rejected classes? Those that wanted them had Raku as the failed Perl 6. They are just going in circles.

Raku is Not Perl, and hasn't been since they renamed the project to recognize it was a new and different language.

perl6 aka rakudo moar or whatever aka raku came about because people wanted classes and other modern features in perl6 but wanted it *done right*. The raku folk with Wall's poking ended up debating for a decade and then rewrote the whole language - it is not akin to french evolving from latin with some additions, its a totally different language.

Those that wanted to fix the traditional perl dialect seem to have stuck around and keep adding improvements, and this is one of those. I'm sure perl is even more expressive now, for better or worse.

perl devs from my experiences at meeting them at conferences/talks/LUG were traditionally older and more conservative and willing to debate fine points of grammar. I wonder if they are retiring out (Wall is what almost 70) and newer devs or business is driving this sort of change - I could never see anyone agreeing on a class implementation in perl5 15 years ago - but I'm so out of touch with the community these days this is just conjecture.

[fitzie]

To be honest, most language based package / dependency stores turn into this before long. NPM, and crates.io may be popular now (as CPAN was) but they will ultimately turn into the same old sad neglected places. Again, just going in circles.

i suspect the future languages like perl/python/ruby will have their runtimes ported to wasm, and their collective package repositories will be managed via curator teams using LLMs to support a vast number of packages both in their originial api's and a more aligned api for wherever those languages go.

If you look at software development trajectory, open source was just the first step towards a global code tree that is still currently in it's infancy, and once it picks up steam no language needs be left behind.

[Developer12]

For what I use Perl for, classes and unicode (really?) aren't needed. But nice to see Perl getting some love .. so to speak.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

[darkonix]

Ok, cool!
But when will Perl have a switch-case statement like many other languages?
It sucks to have many if-else conditions and it sucks to have warnings with given-when!

It would make Perl code clearer, so... never

[darkonix]

Python doesn't have a switch statement either, or well it didn't up until recently when the match statement was introduced in Python 3.10 released in 2022.

Python 's match can be used as a switch replacement but because it supports pattern matching it has much more powerful capabilities than a simple switch.

[mcilloni]

What was wrong with the old blessing system?

It is very "low level", and while immensely powerful, blessing is quite error prone if done improperly. Just like function signatures, Corinna's classes are just syntactic sugar that helps writing structures instead of hacking packages (which is still happening underneath AFAIK)

[EphemeralEft]

It is very "low level", and while immensely powerful, blessing is quite error prone if done improperly. Just like function signatures, Corinna's classes are just syntactic sugar that helps writing structures instead of hacking packages (which is still happening underneath AFAIK)

According to the Perl docs, classes are an entirely different system, not just syntactic sugar around blessing.