[Ovid]

Well, duh :) Perl's still more popular than people think. I saw on the Board of Directors for the Perl foundation for years, regularly speak at conferences for it, have released tons of open-source software for it, and currently am working on the Corinna project to improve the core OOP for the language: https://github.com/Ovid/Cor

Given that this site, like so many others, is to help me get work, I think it's natural I'd use Perl in my examples.

[ktpsns]

Interesting – within the Corinna project, you aim to improve Perl5, isn't it? Is there some reason why you don't spend your time on Perl6?

[Ovid]

Oh, that is a long and complicated story.

Perl 6 was announced a long time ago, but it took many years of development and planning and I (like others) used to joke that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be written in Perl 6. And then we got egg on our face when Duke Nukem Forever was released first. (And it turned out to be a turkey).

However, many clients I spoke to at that time were telling me they wouldn't upgrade their Perl code because they were waiting for the new version ... which was seemingly never going to arrive. Worse, it became clear that Perl 6 was a new language, with common roots, but it wasn't like the Python 2/3 split: a wholesale rewrite of code would be necessary, or try to use a Perl 5 compatibility mode that may or may not have proven useful.

So companies weren't upgrading, Perl developers were fighting, people were leaving the community and the Osborne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) could be renamed the Perl 6 Effect (I'm aware that the Osborne Effect is more complicated than it's often portrayed).

Worse, Perl 5 couldn't upgrade to Perl 6 because that version number was taken. Perl looked, to the outside world, like it wasn't upgrading any more. I even had one guy screaming at me at a Linux Conference about how Perl is shit, hadn't updated in 20 years, and ticked off a bunch of "facts" about Perl, most of which were objectively incorrect at the time, but Perl could no longer get its message out.

There was discussion about leap-frogging the version number and going straight for Perl 7, but that caused even more fights, more people dropping out of the community, and we fractured. We tried saying "the name of the language is Perl 5 and we're upgrading every year—we're currently on version 34—but that didn't satisfy anyone, either.

Eventually, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku (http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-...) and that freed us to upgrade our version number, but to what? Sawyer X, the former Perl Pumpking (development manager) proposed the Perl 7 project, but for many reasons, that also caused much anger.

So today, we have Perl. There are ideas of moving to Perl 7, but much work needs to be done. My Corinna OOP project is likely part of that work and the Perl Steering Committee has met with me to say they'd like Corinna in core, but slowly, step-by-step, to ensure that we don't push too much into the core and make mistakes we can't easily back out of.

I have more ideas about what is needed to get to Perl 7, but they'll largely wait until after Corinna is in core and fleshed out. It's a lot of work and the team working on Corinna (making great suggestions and also helping me not make boneheaded errors), have put in a lot of effort to create something we can turn into a proper RFC. Paul Evan's Object::Pad (https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad) is a testbed for many of these ideas.

So, we're getting there, but slowly. However, it appears to be moving along more smoothly than other efforts in the past. The fact that the goal is more modest helps.

[pdenton]

Thank you for your detailed explanation. I think this would be worthy of an HN submission of its own.

Also, I'd prefer a language with slow incremental changes because it eases the maintenance burden.

[byron4242]

> Well, duh :) Perl's still more popular than people think.

There is no way to define the word "popular" that makes this a true statement with regard to Perl 5 or any future development thereof shooting for backwards compatibility. -- I hate to be the negative nancy in this regard, but I seriously think that this is a cold and hard truth that is causing a lot of suffering because of people who fail to acknowledge it. (Disclosure: I work in a shop that forces me to do Perl, and I hate it with a passion).

One definition of "popular" would be: You ask programmers "Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?" [1]. 48.2% will then answer Python compared to 6.75% who will answer Ruby and 2.46% who will answer Perl.

Another definition of "popular" would be: Drilling down into those 2.46%, you ask them whether they love doing Perl or dread having to do Perl. 64% will answer they dread it [2]. This definitely agrees with my own experience working in a Perl-shop. Most people say they'd rather be doing something else. The company just feels that it doesn't make economic sense, so we're stuck with it.

For the other ones, I seriously suspect a case of Stockholm syndrome or something of the sort. -- Those would be the ones corresponding to the 0.86% (0.0246 x 0.36 = 0.00855) who say they do Perl and they actually like it.

The Perl code that's currently out there is literally sitting on top of an ecosystem that is rotting away beneath it [3]. For legacy code, the argument can sometimes be made that the situation is not bad enough yet to warrant moving away from Perl. But starting a new greenfield project in Perl 5 is, in my opinion, nothing short of professional malpractice.

So Perl is pretty much relegated to the hobbyist sphere, with Perl 5 maybe being of interest to retrocomputing aficionados. In that sense 80s-BASIC is very much the proper comparison class. Not modern-day Python or Ruby.

With Perl 6 / Raku not offering a viable migration path, one has to look at it the same way one would look at any other modern-day programming language upstart, with all the problems that entails (like lack of ecosystem, etc.)

Introspecting my own psychological experience now, I would go as far as to say that the open source developer community keeping Perl alive is perhaps the only group of people who truly meet the definition of giving the world something for free out of the goodness of their hearts (even in a way that ends up putting money in my own pockets), but who I actively dislike because of that. I feel like: If only Perl 5 would die a sudden death instead of this slow creeping demise, then, maybe, for me too this torture could finally come to an end.

[1] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

[2] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...

[3] https://perlancar.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/dwindling-cpan-re...

[lizmat]

FWIW, the Raku Programming Language nowadays *DOES* offer a valid migration path in the form of the Inline::Perl5 (https://raku.land/cpan:NINE/Inline::Perl5) module. This basically allows you to use all of CPAN that doesn't do source filters.

This allows you to gradually move your code into Raku, replacing Perl 5 modules by Raku ones as needed.

As we're about to reach the 2000 modules in the Raku ecosystem mark, it should be noted that many modules from CPAN are not needed, as they're builtins in the Raku Programming Language. And many CPAN modules have outlived their usefulness in any programming language.

[byron4242]

Thanks for the pointer. I will look into this with great interest and get a discussion going within my company about whether this implies that we would want to start permitting Raku into our codebase. But I very much doubt that this permission will be granted in the end.

[lizmat]

Well, the answer is always "no" if you don't ask :-)