Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond [LWN.net]

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 13, 2011 16:13 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
Parent article: Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

i love the modern perl renaissance. they're making regular meaningful releases. cpan is as great as ever. new meta-packages like moose and mojolicious are keeping me interested.

perl6 will either arrive or not. i've kept up with whats happening in perl6 land and i'm treating it as a player-to-be-named-later. until then, i'm glad that the perl5 team is cherrypicking the best-of and migrating it in to perl5

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Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 13, 2011 16:23 UTC (Tue) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (10 responses)

It will be rather comical if perl6 ends up abandoned without ever seeing any real use, and development moves back to perl5. I half expect this to happen, though. Still, perl6 will prove to have been a rather costly mistake^Wlearning experience.

What is good is that perl5 will finally have a strategy for future evolution. The backwards compatibility has been imposed way too harshly for way too long, and has concerned even features that are widely seen as mistakes to be corrected. To name an example, Perl thinks you refer to package variable $name::s when you type "$name's dog". (The :: package separator can be written as ' although nobody does it.)

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 13, 2011 18:11 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

well i don't know about development moving "back" to perl5 since the communities have virtually no overlap. my guess is if perl6 ever terminated, the interested parties would probably move on to some other prototypical thing

in any case, perl6 is doing fine. both parrot and rakudo are making regular releases...they're well on their way toward their goal. the question for developers is if the perl6 team goals coincide with their own.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 2:45 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (8 responses)

> To name an example, Perl thinks you refer to package variable $name::s when you type "$name's dog".
Well, for what it's worth, string interpolation is pointless to begin with as $name."'s dog" works perfectly fine.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 3:15 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Well, for what it's worth, string interpolation is pointless to begin with as $name."'s dog" works perfectly fine.

Now try that in a lengthy "here document." Sure, interpolation is a waste on short strings, but it's quite handy when you have a larger bit of boiler plate.

At least the syntax ${names}'s works around the "feature."

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 15:26 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (6 responses)

Why would I write $name."'s dog" when I can write the much more readable "${name}'s dog" ?
(And last I heard, Perl's concatenation was slightly slower than interpolation anyway, though I care less about that than about concatenation being less readable than interpolation.)

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 15:38 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (3 responses)

> Why would I write $name."'s dog" when I can write the much more readable "${name}'s dog" ?
Which of these is more readable is entirely subjective, so you don't have much of a point.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 15:51 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh yeah, I forgot, we're talking about Perl here, so nobody cares about readability.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 18:43 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Sorry, but you don't make any sense whatsoever.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 17:36 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Readability is not subjective, because there are testable human norms which exist, and readability is generally concerned with the overall result.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 14, 2011 23:40 UTC (Wed) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

This line of argument misses the point. What I dislike is two competing ways to write the same thing, the other which is not even used but still isn't removed. I used this to illustrate the fact that Perl is backwards compatible to a fault.

Vincent: Perl 5.16 and Beyond

Posted Sep 15, 2011 0:19 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

yes perl maintains backwards compatibility and many ways to do the same thing.

for some people this is a problem

for other people this is part of the great power of perl and why they love to use it.

but in any case, this shouldn't be news to anyone.