What happened to Perl 7?

Posted May 27, 2022 15:03 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: What happened to Perl 7? by Gladrim
Parent article: What happened to Perl 7?

> Why does a mature programming language (>30 years in this case) need to be rapidly adding new features?

Other languages including C++ and Python are adding new features all the time despite being decades old. This is hardly unusual.

What happened to Perl 7?

Posted May 27, 2022 16:39 UTC (Fri) by Gladrim (subscriber, #45751) [Link] (2 responses)

Unusual? Sadly not. Car accidents aren't unusual either. Doesn't mean they're a good idea or something we should aspire to involve ourselves in.

What happened to Perl 7?

Posted May 27, 2022 20:30 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

> Unusual? Sadly not. Car accidents aren't unusual either.

This is a bogus comparison. Car accidental are strictly harmful. Language changes can introduce substantial new widely anticipated features that are objectively an improvement to developers (I can point to any number of relatively recent C++ changes as examples here) although not universally so. If you have a preference for a more static language, just stick to an older version or continue using a language that barely changes at all, Perl may not be suitable for you. As long as backward compatibility is maintained, I still don't see a problem.

What happened to Perl 7?

Posted May 27, 2022 21:07 UTC (Fri) by Gladrim (subscriber, #45751) [Link]

It was a simple illustration that just because something is "hardly unusual" doesn't mean it's a good thing.

> If you have a preference for a more static language, just stick to an older version or continue using a language that barely changes at all, Perl may not be suitable for you.

Precisely. I think that was clear from my first comment.