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Re: Perl 7 or Perl 2013?
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From:
Joel Berger
Date:
February 7, 2013 17:03
Subject:
Re: Perl 7 or Perl 2013?
Message ID:
CAAMA-9MhTPVzJoJD86pXY_Lhqkb0nuFpL4==_7hdrXyYzH3Rig@mail.gmail.com
> From: Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org>
> To: Ovid <curtis.poe@gmail.com>
> Cc: perl5-porters@perl.org
> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2013 13:45:27 -0500
> Subject: Re: Perl 7 or Perl 2013?
>
> This topic has come up many times in the past few years. It is generally
> in
> the form "let's call the next one Perl 7" or "let's hide the 5 and call it
> version 18" and sometimes "Perl $Year."
>
> These all say, "Perl is the language, and Perl 6 is something irrelevant."
> This is specifically in contradiction to Larry, who has *specifically* and
> *repeatedly* addressed this point in keynotes and other public
> presentations.
>
> We can't call it "Perl {$x>5}" without contradicting Larry, and if some
> folks
> are interested in organizing a committee to badger Larry *even more* about
> this
> issue, the most I can really do is say that this isn't the place to do
> organize
> such a committee. I'd also like to say that this has been addressed so
> many
> times that further pressing of the issue seems inappropriate.
>
> Furthermore, were Perl 7 to be released (secretly known to be Perl 5.20.0),
> what would the outcome be? It would gain attention, and people would say,
> "Wow, a big new release of Perl? What's new? Oh. Not very much! Ho
> hum."
> It gets us attention and then squanders it, because it isn't able to
> deliver on
> "all the amazing cool new stuff." What's amazing and cool since 5.8? Many
> excellent features ranging from "small but very handy" to "significant and
> useful in some circumstances." I am delighted to have s///r and lexical
> subs
> and (soon) subroutine signatures, but if the notion is that people think
> nothing has happened in 10 years, and the answer they get is those, I
> think we
> will appear desperate rather than vibrant.
>
> --
> rjbs
>
>
Hi Ricardo,
First and foremost, I want to say that, I realize that I'm new to the Perl
community. I also hope that I even post this message correctly! I know I
don't get much of a vote in this as such, but I want to respond to this
comment because I feel strongly about it.
I learned Perl mostly from perldoc and StackOverflow. I am very familiar
both from when I was a noob and now as I try to help the noobs, what some
of the sentiment is. One that I see often is "should/must I use strict and
warnings?" (http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bperl%5D+strict+warnings)
or else they have problems that would have been solved if they did. The
inevitable question then is "why aren't these the defaults?" and the answer
is always backward compatibility, and rightly so.
The same thing happens (though less often) with unicode. There is of course
the famous rant from tchrist:
http://stackoverflow.com/q/6162484/468327which by the way ranks as the
all time most voted [Perl] question on SO.
Perl now has great unicode support, but it can't be enabled by default
(even those features which make sense to autoenable). In fact even the
default encoding of the scripts and the handles can't be changed.
There are more nits like indirect object syntax which people trip over, `or
die $!` on opens, and other nits that mostly remain for backwards
compatibility. Wouldn't it be great if we could enable `no indirect` or
`use autodie` by default?
I think the biggest thing a breaking release (I personally favor Perl 7)
would bring is a chance to flip those defaults. Perl 7 could still support
all those ancient scripts; they would just need a few lines at the top to
re-enable those old features. Think `no strict; use indirect`. (In fact I
would favor a special casing of (s)?print(f)? because changing all the
`print STDERR ...` might be over-burdensome.
These are things that the outside community either sees first and thinks
"man I need too much boilerplate" or "gosh why don't they just fix these
things" and leave or gripe, or else they don't know to think that and
discover that Perl without a safety net is too much trouble and just leave
and we never knew they were there.
Much of what I've written here is echoed in my blog post,
http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2013/02/on-the-version-number-succeeding-perl-5.html
.
I hope you'll consider a Perl 7 (or whatever) as a chance not to just make
a publicity splash with a new number, but take it as an opportunity to fix
some things that really do hurt Perl's perception in the first few weeks of
learning it, which is a crucial time to woo a potential future
core-contributor.
"Perl 7, the product of years of experience with Perl 5, now with the
defaults that help you get going faster. Don't worry about your old
scripts, they work too with just a few minor additions." Sounds nice to me.
Thank you for reading and thank you for all your work making Perl X great!
Joel Berger
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