Re: Future Of Perl

Perl 5 went through its "wilderness years" in the early part of this century with not much development of the Perl core, but it's back on a steady development schedule now with a new stable version expected each year.

Of course, even during those years plenty of development happened outside the core, in modules. It's the vast collection of modules which is usually cited as Perl 5's most valuable feature. Fairly consistently around 1000 releases are uploaded to CPAN (the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network - the one-stop shop for open source Perl modules) each month; three quarters are new versions of existing modules, but around 250 each month are brand new.

Perl 6 is the future, but how long it will be before it's usable in practice is anybody's guess. There are currently two pretty good implementations. The biggest barrier right now is that the implementations cannot run Perl 5 code. (Perl 6 is backwards incompatible, though it does have a Perl 5 mode, allowing it to run older code. However, neither of these implementations support this mode yet.) Given that I said Perl 5's most valuable feature is its modules, you can see why this is currently a big weakness for Perl 6!

It will get there eventually though, we hope. In the mean time, we still have Perl 5, which is now in very active development again. (And Perl 6 acts as a good place to steal ideas from for Perl 5 development!)

Perl is not as fashionable as it was, say 10 years ago, but it remains one of the most widely used programming languages. (In the top 10 according to TIOBE, which is of course just a very rough indicator.) Perl is used by the BBC, Amazon and IMDB. Large pieces of software like Bugzilla and Moveable Type are written in Perl.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

Comment on Re: Future Of Perl

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Re^2: Future Of Perl by Anonymous Monk on Jun 07, 2012 at 04:35 UTC
Perl 6 is the future Not that I disagree. But telling this to newbies sort of gets them interested to go do some search about it. And when they get know how things are actually going in reality. It doesn't do good for Perl marketing. We will market Perl 6 when it gets as good a Perl 5. Until then Perl means Perl 5.	[reply]
Re^3: Future Of Perl by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jun 07, 2012 at 06:55 UTC
I agree! Acting like Perl 6 is inevitable does listeners a disservice. Several smart people are working hard on it, but it's also burned out a lot of people over its long lifetime, and it has no practical implementations yet. I expect it will one day be practical, but I don't expect it soon and I won't predict when it will be. I suspect that in five years, the Perl 5 I write today will still be running my business.	[reply]