There are 6 evolutionary expressions of Perl, two in active development and use, and four vintages (some known to still be in use) waiting for someone to plug in Unicode 10 or something because they are probably lean, mean text-processing machines that would enjoy being embedded in some RPi an droids:

Perl 1.0_16        2003-Dec-18
Perl 2.001         1988-Jun-28
Perl 3.044         1991-Jan-12
Perl 4.036         1993-Feb-05     Very stable.
Perl 5.28.0        2018-Jun-23
Perl 6             2015-Dec-25

Perls are just waiting to be tossed at unsuspecting and grateful software consumers. It's not like people care how their apps work. For example I have never installed Python on purpose but there are 6 versions of the thing with stuff like Tcl and Wx installed on my laptop. Anyway my favorite IDE seems to function by running python scripts behind some fancy wxwidgets to highlight and eval perl code in real time! I guess they make money by giving it away to people and selling it to businesses. I think that can be done in Perl with some CPAN modules too. I mean something impressive with Devel::REPL glued to PPI feeding Text::Highlight with real-time Perl::Critic, RegExp::Debugger, Pod::Simple, NYTProf etc. with a Tcl::Tk or HTML/Javascript GUI all packed into something that installs with one click and starts with two. My next project, and maybe yours... ;-)

I forgot one of the most important features of a pure Perl IDE: Perl::Tidy output!!!

"in the long term we are all dead", Keynes.

Evolving, true. But a) How Perl can tame and shape that evolution and b) evolution time-scales might be a bit longer than people worry about and draw the line somewhere. The mind can not constantly worry, it goes crazy. So other minds take over with different priorities (and different brain-washing, sorry nurturing)

On the other hand, I agree with anonymous above who says Perl will live for ever. I have never understood why we all silently follow this craze of Capitalism to pseudo-evolve whereas in fact it is shutting one market and opening another for profit's sake without me seeing any benefit.

And finally, re: evolution, M$ has kept some of us in the stone-age for 30 years. Some are more powerfull than others but eventually die.

bw, bliako

> pseudo-evolve

I wasn't talking about pseudo upgrades.

A built-in Moose like OO system would be nice.

It doesn't need to be fast, just stable.

> How Perl can tame and shape that evolution

Evolution is about try and error and prooving fitness.

We need a better playground for experimenting with new language features. Syntactic macros come to mind.

We need a better hooking policy:

• on one side P5P can't support all changes to builtin behaviour.
• OTOH is PadWalker still considered an unsupported hack, why?

We need a better language definition:

• more orthogonality (e.g. aliasing, local only for package vars ... why?)
• beginner friendlier docs highlighting the essential features and banning the edge cases to footnotes.
• pragmas helping to enforce mainstream while still allowing backwards compatibility

We need a better narrative what and why Perl does...

(my train is arriving...)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}