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Letters to the Editor: Perl process 'alive and well'


By SD Times News Team
March 2, 2009 — 
Since you referenced me in your article, “The end for Perl?” {http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33186} allow me to say that the Perl 6 development process is alive and well, and gaining incredible speed. Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) is rapidly approaching beta status, with more useful functionality being generated every day. A usable public beta release should appear at OSCON this summer, with an early-adopter, production-ready release available by year's end.

Sure, it's been a long time since Perl 6 was first announced, and a few false starts to test implementation ideas have come and gone, but with each round, more was learned about how to tame this beast. A language that has all the things we've come to appreciate in classic Perl, as well as all the things people expect from a modern language, is not an easy task. The work to create a solid VM base that will allow language interoperability (20+ languages have proof-of-concept implementations) that would also support Perl's unusual demands was a bit more difficult than had been initially imagined, and that led to some delay as well. We've also had to deal with illnesses and distractions of some of the key members.

I'm still fully committed to updating our seminal Learning/Intermediate/Mastering Perl series for Perl 6 as soon as we get closer to a good beta release, and to continuing to have Stonehenge be the leading boutique training and consulting company for both Perl 5 and Perl 6.

Randal L. Schwartz

Editor’s note: Randal L. Schwartz is co-author of several books on Perl and founder of Stonehenge Consulting Services, a Perl training company.

Comments from the Web
You can't complain about Perl without the religious zealots coming out.

Of course all the tons of people who have a hard time with its cartoon-character-swearing syntax are wrong: It's easy! If most Perl projects are filled with gawd-awful code, that's because of the programmers. It couldn't possibly be because the tool itself is flawed. We definitely want the programming language we use to be like a natural language so we have even more of a chance to misunderstand each other like we do with people all the time! And we all want surprise in our life, so we would definitely want a language that even gurus get surprised by.

"Programmer"
United States

Using Google trends as an argument is very lame. Perl is not specifically losing ground to Python or Ruby, it's just that the dev languages market is sparser now with so many great newcomers. Throw "java" (or "php") into the equation and you'll see that it declined steadily and in sync with Perl's decline.

Does that mean Java's dead? I don't think so. Besides, matching the reserved "perl" token against the more universal "python" and "ruby" is bogus.

Maybe the Perl language should be renamed "Pearl" for the sake of good search volume and lax columnists.

"Rodrigo"
Spain

Why is it that when someone has extensively used Python and Perl, they always choose Python and caution against Perl? Why is it that the people who choose Perl have never even tried Python except to quickly prove to themselves that they won't like it? Why is it that Perl people always describe a framework as good when it "stays out of my way," and every other language in existence describes a framework as good when it makes the job easier?

"Sensibility"

United States


Related Search Term(s): Perl


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33306
 

Comments

03/02/2009 05:03:44 PM EST

Python (or Ruby, I suppose, with DRY) is easier to manage. Perl is easier to write in, with TMTOWTDI.

United StatesPerl Enthusiast


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