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by Vvector 1899 days ago
But what he said is true. With all the focus on Perl 6, Perl 5 stagnated for nearly 20, with barely any improvements. Other languages came along and displaced Perl for many jobs.

No, Perl won't disappear any time soon. It still excels at a few things. And like Fortran and COBOL, Perl will also have a long life as a legacy language.
2 comments
b2gills 1891 days ago
It wasn't even stagnant for a full 10 years, let alone 20.

Perl 5.8 was released in 2002

Perl 5.10 was released in 2007

It has had a release every year since 5.12 in 2010.

The latest was 5.32 on 2020-Jun-20. (Less than a year ago.)

The book Modern Perl was first released in 2010. It's 4th edition was released in 2015.

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Even if you ignored 5.10, there is only 8 years from 5.8 to 5.12 when the yearly releases started happening.

I really don't understand how you managed to get 20 years from any of those dates.

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emilper 1898 days ago
... why do you think Perl 5 stagnated for 20 years ?

There were like 10% performance improvements at each new release, a lot of work was done in modules which was by design Perl 5 having a small core and a lot of the features being implemented in modules ...

What feature exists in other languages (except for CPU types: int, float, char etc.) and does not exist in Perl 5 ?

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