[pm-h] Perl 7?

[Mark Allen]

The routes one comes to a programming language are definitely varied in nature and scope. And most of the people I work with don't argue that Perl isn't capable, its just that in so many different ways, there's a strong bias toward something else.

Speaking about my own $DAYJOB now, we use quite a bit of Perl internally, the most interesting application being a security-analysis DSL that processes hundreds of thousands of security events an hour. But we have long past reached the point where Perl (yes, we are using *shudder* threaded Perl) can handle this load at scale and we are replacing the whole lot of it with Erlang (Real Soon Now). On my own team which writes common enterprise web services, our bias is toward Erlang and then Python as a fallback.  On the common UI front our bias is toward Javascript and PHP (although we are currently in a Thunderdome style death match between PHP and Python - two languages enter, one language leaves...)  The bias towards a back end processing language here is not actually a "vanity" preference, although those biases seep into the choice among suitable languages for the job (for example, there's no technical reason why we should necessarily pick Erlang over
 Go or Clojure, we just happen to have a number of talented Erlang programmers here already so why move away from it when it's totally adequate? (P.S. Don't get me wrong, Erlang has a syntax only its mother could love, and it drives me crazy sometimes, but people say that about Perl too :)))

If your primarily object with a given programming language "A" is to serve requests for content over HTTP, then yes, there are about 11ty billion (give or take 3) that will meet your needs. Heck you could probably write a whole Mojo style HTTP service stack in Brainfuck (not that you should! mind you), so on that point I agree that a lot of language preference tends to be some kind of vanity choice (like, I am really smug, so I need to write Ruby, or I am really anal about whitespace, so I need to write in Python, or I prefer to write what looks like line noise so I pick Perl...)

So anyway, alas, my interaction with Perl in a day-to-day way is mostly in my side projects or in my role as a maintainer of perldoc or Net::Amazon::EC2 and I don't expect that will be changing soon even if I were to take a new $DAYJOB somewhere. (P.P.S. Note to any recruiters: not currently looking, but thanks for asking.)

Mark


________________________________
 From: B. Estrade <estrabd at gmail.com>
To: "Houston.pm located in Houston, TX." <houston at pm.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2013 11:05 AM
Subject: Re: [pm-h] Perl 7?
 
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Mark Allen <mrallen1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This conversational topic comes up from time to time and it really is a
> bikeshed.
>
> It's going to take more than a new version number to get (most) people
> (re-)interested in Perl in a major way.
>
> That's my NSHO.

This is a good recent interview with Damian Conway.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/conway-perl

He compares Perl to the air we breath, you don't notice it much
because it's all around you. I tend to agree.

Regarding the lack of interest in Perl, I've come to the conclusion
that if you come from a traditional *nix POV, Perl is inevitable in
your progression from writing shell scripts.  Some move on, but I
gather many do not - and why would you?  My point is that it might
have more to do with a decline (or lack of noise from) true
*nixphiles.  You might jump to Ruby due to Puppet if you're managing
largish infrastructure; I am not sure how one would fall into Python
from this path, but I am sure there are ways.

People who poo-poo Perl 5 typically are typically paradigm
(OOP/functional/DSL) zealots and language snobs. I think it gets lost
on them the originating purpose and goals of Perl.

In the video Conway makes another good point that nearly all languages
do most things well or good enough. This is an indication that
programming languages and environments are pretty close to being a
"finished" technology (sort of like cars, radios, tvs, refrigerators,
etc).  The point of me bringing this up is to say that I think at this
point in the game, people are making language decisions on the same
kinds of reasons that they choose to drive one car over the other.

Brett

>
> Mark
>
> ________________________________
> From: B. Estrade <estrabd at gmail.com>
> To: "Houston.pm located in Houston, TX." <houston at pm.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2013 9:52 AM
> Subject: [pm-h] Perl 7?
>
> It's a bike shed (symbolic and shrewd as it may be), but I like the
> idea...and not just because I've mentioned this myself to anyone who'd
> listen. :)
>
>     http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/02/perl-7.html
>
> Brett
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>
>
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