in reply to Future Of Perl

Please let me know what is the future and growth of the Perl.
See Perl 5 dev, the Perl homepage, and other Perl sites. Also, see Perl News.

Will it be on par with the languages like Java and .NET?
What do you mean with "on par"? Keep in mind that Java and .NET are mostly corporate-controlled languages. Perl is community-developed.
Each language has its purpose. Perl was originally for reports, hence the acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language". Since then, it has been used for everything from system administration to web development and then some.
Java was originally for platform-independent programming. Of course, that too has been expanded.
.NET is Microsoft's software framework that allows users to use a M$ language such as C# or VB. Perl is not a software framework in itself, we have modules for that.

Essentially, you(or your company) should choose a language that accomplishes a job as quickly and efficiently as possible. While I would like to say that Perl should be the universal solution, that is not always the case, and sometimes you will have to use a different language.

~Thomas~
confess( "I offer no guarantees on my code." );

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Re^2: Future Of Perl
by bedohave9 (Acolyte) on Jun 05, 2012 at 20:51 UTC

    My apologies. I know someone will definitely will get back with this question. Not to hurt anyone, but just wanted to be sure it gives a concrete path and development in future. Once in an interview one of the Perl Maestros told the viewers of Qualcomm that "This is an old and ancient language, but is still live. We have a need to develop more very meticulously on par with the other commercial languages.

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      What interview, and with who? I'm pretty sure that no real Perl developer would really say that.

      Perl is, I guess you could say, an "ancient language" -- it is from 1987. It has been redone several times, with the transition of Perl 4 to Perl 5 probably being the most important so far. As you may have noticed, Perl has a much longer release cycle than, say, PHP, which is already on version 6 and has been around for much shorter of a time period. IIRC, PHP4 was the standard in 2009, PHP5 in 2010, and PHP6 now. Perl is still onversion 5, and has been since the late 90s(not including subversions, which are released more often, the most recent being 5.16.0).

      ~Thomas~
      confess( "I offer no guarantees on my code." );
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[d/l]

        Actually, PHP 6 is a similar situation to Perl 6. Development is going a lot slower than was initially hoped, and although the 5.x series had been planned for retirement after 5.2.x, it is now once again the mainline version, with 5.3.x and 5.4.x having been released including some of the functionality originally planned for PHP 6.

        That said, I'd expect PHP 6 to be ready before Perl 6. It's a much less ambitious update to the language.

        Also: PHP 4 was not the standard in 2009. PHP 5 was released in 2004, and by 2009 most large software projects had dropped support for PHP 4. (PHP 4's object model is pretty awful.)

        (PHP is my second language... third if you count English.)

        perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'
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        Versioning policies tend to be arbitary and often fail to give an accurate sense of what advances, if any, (and of any relevance to the user), have been incorporated.

        It's also worth noting, in the face of the OP and clarification, that Perl versions => 5.almost-nothing are still in wide use and very effectively -- and for many intents, on something like par for 5.16. It depends on what you need... but in this case, the SOPW needs to recognize that the path forward is will the current version.

        But back to the PHP comparison: while I don't use PHP4 or 5, with any regularity, I'd regard difference as more nearly akin to Perl 4.x vs Perl 4.x+1.

[reply]

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