[evilneanderthal]

I disagree with your statement. Momentum and hype are good for attracting those who choose a language based on its momentum and hype. If you are choosing a language to perform a task based on any objective criteria, momentum and hype interfere with your ability to choose and are therefore repulsive.

[rjurney]

You are quoting the standard perl attitude: languages are not cool/uncool, they are only useful or un-useful. Meanwhile Perl is not 'cool,' most people have moved on from Perl, Perl 6 will never ship, and Perl is dying.

Perl has a marketing problem, and the first step towards fixing it is to accept that cool matters. There are very few young Perl programmers.

[chromatic]

How can you write "Perl 6 will never ship"? Rakudo has monthly stable releases; last week they released their 17th stable release in a row.

(If you believe that a group of people who've demonstrated that they can make and meet commitments over a long period of time will suddenly stop, how can you believe that any group of people will ever release any software that takes longer than a week or two to write?)

[rjurney]

Its been a long time in development, and is completely dependent on a stable Parrot - something very few people use. Its been almost 10 years, I just don't think it will ship 1.0. DNF.

I think Perl 5 will take the good parts, and use them, and that Perl 6 is a pure R&D platform. Moose being a good example.

I would love to be wrong. But in the meanwhile I can't even work with other people my age in the language of choice because none of them know Perl.

It sucks.

[chromatic]

People said we'd never release Parrot 1.0 either (people said that as recently as November) -- but why speculate when you can measure?

We released Parrot 1.0 in March. We released Parrot 1.1 in April. We released Parrot 1.2 in May. We'll release Parrot 2.0 in January 2010 and Parrot 3.0 in January 2011.

Keep that in mind as you look at the daily Rakudo status reports. As of last week, Rakudo passed 68% of the current spectests. The passing test velocity has only increased this year.

[rjurney]

Calling it Parrot 1.0 doesn't mean its stable. You can call it 10.0, doesn't mean people are gonna switch.

I'm not as well informed as you, but I'm just really skeptical about a 10 year old project shipping 1.0. I'm pissed off that Perl has died in the meanwhile. Something went terribly wrong and the language was mis-managed.

[chromatic]

What else would we call Parrot 1.0? We believe that Parrot 1.0 represents a stable platform on which people can start to build compilers.

It's not a finished platform (which is why we continue to produce new releases), but we have a documented and well-understood deprecation policy.

We'll add new features, but we believe that the current set of features in Parrot 1.0 is sufficient to build a workable language.

(As for the question of "Is Perl dead?", the rate of uploads to the CPAN certainly disagrees. That's a measurable data point. I won't address the question of Perl 5's release policy and backwards compatibility concerns here; I've discussed them at length elsewhere.)

[chorny]

Python 3 was developed 10 years, Perl 6 development started later and it is more complex redesign.

[kingkongrevenge]

> Perl is not 'cool'

If you don't think Perl 6 is cool you must not know anything about it.

[rjurney]

Does it have Perl in the name? Then it may be great, but its not cool. The kids think it sucks. And if you don't care about the kids, then you don't care about the future.

[skorgu]

I don't like perl, for one reason or another we never got along. I respect the hell out of it though. Perl is so far from dead it's achieved complete success and become invisible.

A large amount of infrastructure at my workplace is written in (and much of it will continue to be written in) perl. Perl5 is sort of like vi, it'll probably be on whatever system you're logging into in some form or other.

One of my co workers is a Perl6 evangelist, to the point of caricature.

That may not be cool by your (or Reddit's or TechCrunch's or whatever) standards and it may very well never be as popular for writing the next big web app but but as one of the underpinnings of the internet it's cool by me.

[rjurney]

Yeah, Perl 5 pays the bills. I code in it every day. I am most fluent in Perl. My point is that the long-delay of Perl 6 and the large volumes of crusty CGI code around has created an image problem.

[skorgu]

CGI is filthy, sure. But being able to run your filthy hack of a config file parser on an unpatched HPUX box from circa 30,000 BC with no changes?

That's cool. Maybe not cool on the same axis as Rails and Twitter but cool nonetheless.

[wingo]

I choose to interpret this as a lovely ironic statement. Well done!

[abyssknight]

I have to agree with evilneanderthal. Pick the tool that does the job. For most batch processing jobs, Perl is the tool that will get it done the fastest both in run and development time. It's just built to process that kind of data, and the community has built an excellent library to do so.

[msluyter]

Unfortunately, a lot of so called objective criteria are either entirely subjective or difficult to measure. Are variable names that begin with special characters like '$' easier for the brain to handle than those without? It'd be an interesting topic for a study (assuming one could be done), but lacking any clear empirical evidence, debates will rage on about this and other minutia.

Meanwhile, I'm going to keep using Python. ;)

[access_denied]

All in all I agree with you, but I think momentum can be part of objective criteria. Not in the language itself, but as part of a human ressources or marketing strategy. Also, sometimes the language with momentum is the one with the library. Case in point: Cocoa bridge under Leopard exists for Python, Ruby and .. not for Perl.

[draegtun]

Actually there is a Cocoa bridge for Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net/

Its fallen a bit behind on the BridgeSupport API: http://bridgesupport.macosforge.org/

Does PyObjC now fully support BridgeSupport?

[access_denied]

Thanks for the pointer!