On the future of Perl 5

Posted Dec 3, 2008 16:54 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Posted Dec 5, 2008 20:44 UTC (Fri) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link]

That said, Perl has a number of problems:

There are many different OO frameworks. If you want to use CPAN modules, you might end up with three different and incompatible OO frameworks in your dependency list, leading to extreme bloat.

Have you looked at Moose? It is rapidly becoming the defacto OO framework, and I expect nearly all new Perl code utilizing OO will likely make use of it. Some very cool stuff there for the OO fans.

Perl 6 frankly scares me. It seems to me more like a research project conducted by crazy students on drugs than a serious infrastructure development project.

I'm going to guess you haven't looked into it recently? I ask because I felt the same way as you until a few weeks ago. I was talking Perl with a former coworker who'd been playing with Perl6 and the Parrot implementation-in-progress Rakudo, and he informed me that things were rather different than I thought. I took a little time to investigate Parrot, Rakudo, and the Perl 6 specification, and I was very surprised with it's progress. It's not yet at the point where I would write production code based on it, but I plan to start playing with it a little bit. If I were starting a large, long term project, I might give it some serious thought.

The innards of Perl 5 are ugly and mysterious. Its interface for embedding in C is nightmarish compared to (say) Tcl.

Absolutely no argument there. If you're looking for an embedded language, I think Lua's almost impossible to beat, though.

Sadly, I don't see improvements coming. We'll continue to use Perl because we like it and we don't really care what the herd is doing. But it will become harder and harder to find good Perl programmers.

I think you are absolutely correct that Perl has some problems, but I disagree with the lack of improvements and dismal future outlook. I'm actually more optimistic about Perl and it's future now than I was a year ago. I think most of the problems are being addressed, and addressed well.