On Sat, 28 Mar 2015 21:32:31 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>The famous Perl coder Allison Randal writes about why Perl is not dead (it's >just pining for the fjords *wink* ) and contrasts the Perl 5/6 split to >Python 2/3: A shame Allison doesn't frequent these groups. I would have a few questions for her. Perl 6 is in fact a bit like Python 3. Perl 6 is an attempt to recreate the language, addressing (by throwing away or heavily changing) all the things that gave an indication the language would stiffle and die and bring in new ideas to address the demands of modern software design and implementation... But that's not the thing that confuses me most about Allison's post. The whole conversation about Rakudo not being Perl was. Perl 6 is Perl. It is part of the Perl family. And Perl 6 has been developed exclusively as a language specification. Which means it is not a language implementation. Rakudo is one such implementation, for the JVM, of the language specification known as Perl 6. Therefore Rakudo is Perl 6, which means Rakudo is also Perl. I mean, we can all agree Jython is Python. Maybe not CPython, but Python. Maybe not pythonic in all its body, but Python. Rakudo is no different. It's a shame(?) it is gaining no traction (and I think Alisson optimism is either misplaced of whishful thinking). But Rakudo is a reminder to everyone about the design principles and motivations behind Perl 6. For good or bad, because no other implementation of Perl 6 exists yet that can produce working code, which after all this years can only mean that Perl 6 is in deep trouble. The attempt at an analysis of Perl decline seemed to me also largely unable to touch the real spot of why Perl has been declining over the eyars (or rather, why it has declined into a stable but unconfortable low). It doesn't help to try and come up with elaborate, albeit sterile, language constructs. The Cookie Slap! Effect, Singularity Paradox, or the Awkward Adolescent Fallacy are not only vain, but fail to address what I believe is a much simpler explanation. Simply, Perl did come at the right time. But Perl came with a grammar and set of semantics that couldn't survive for long as soon as other languages started to follow on its footsteps. Perl wasn't designed to be a language of the future, rather to be a language that could solve the present problems without much regard to how painful that solution could be to maintain in the future. And Perl solved a whole lot of problems. But now others are doing it too. And in a way more in accordance to the requirements of modern software development. It was simply necessary that languages like Python or Ruby showed up or we would be knee-deep in maintenance hell. Perl also addressed the problems of the so-called Web 1.0. But the Web 2.0 didn't present many of those problems anymore. Suddenly Perl powerful text parsing features weren't so important as other non-generic and more specialized languages started to address the server and client side of web programming. Maybe Perl has a future. I wouldn't count on it though. I think Perl is really dying. I don't say this as a language advocate. That's something I am not. At all. I don't defend or attack programming languages, period. And that's because I find the exercise of programming language advocacy one of the most tragic things to have ever happened to computer science. Objective analysis is a dying art. And if Perl eventually dies. It is no tragedy. It's the loss of a programming language with no real place in the problem domain of modern computing. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
