Comments on: What do you want Perl 5 to be?

By: zero-blog » Corehackers: What I Want

zero-blog » Corehackers: What I Want — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:10:08 +0000

[...] of discussions concerning the problems plaguing Perl 5. David Golden challenged me to respond to his post concerning what I want from Perl 5 moving [...]

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:58:51 +0000

I *really* like the concept introduced in 5.10 of suppressing new features by default, so that upgrades are safer. Note that I am only for this for very established versions - 6.x shouldn't have code to suppress new features like that until 5.x is clearly on the way out due to 6.x ascendancy.

That having been said...
# I want Perl 5 to be rock solid for enterprise use
# I want Perl 5 to be a better language for new development
# I want Perl 5 to be more maintainable
# I want Perl 5 to be more popular
# I want Perl 5 to manage memory better.

By: mirod

mirod — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:45:18 +0000

I think what I want is close to "I want Perl 5 to be rock solid for enterprise use". What I want is actually: "regular code that was written for a previous version of Perl 5 should still work when I upgrade". What I mean by regular is that assumes no knowledge of the internals and doesn't rely on undocumented features. I want this for 2 reasons: when I upgrade Perl, I don't really want to go back and test 13 years worth of big projects, internal modules, quick tools, cron jobs, one liners. Some of this code has tests, but not all of it. Maybe I am just a terrible developer, but a job that spans from sysadmin to web development to data munger doesn't always let me follow best practices (all 256 of them). I would be willing to bet that I am not alone in that case. Beyond my specific situation, I also think that one of the best assets of Perl as a language is its ubiquity. It is installed everywhere, often because it is used during the OS installation. I want to keep it this way. Any time backward compatibility is broken, people who write install scripts get really pissed. And sometimes they decide to rewrite their tools in a different, even more primitive, language. I'd rather they stick to Perl. Or move to Perl from trendier languages that break compatibily. Beyond that, improving the internals to make it both easier to maintain the core and easier to extend it from external modules seems important.

By: Steffen Mueller

Steffen Mueller — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:31:58 +0000

@:m) Perl 6 ist a new language. Any transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6 is a transition to a new language, not to a new version of the same language.

By: Ruslan Zakirov

Ruslan Zakirov — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:45:17 +0000

You forgot:
I want Perl 5 to be much faster
I want Perl 5 internals to be much cleaner

And many more :)

By: :m)

:m) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:16:45 +0000

I would like to go for the typical "new features go into the new version" scenario.

Reduce perl5 efforts to bug squashing and begin to let it be a legacy language.

Put all energy available into getting parrot & rakudo out the door and do improvements there. That's what new versions are for.

Backport some features to perl5 to ensure that projects that cannot be moved to perl6 remain attractive. Although I suspect that if there are massive problems with code, this code might be sloppy or obfuscated and really needed a fresh start.

Aim No.1: Get rid of the image that perl is a nasty, unmaintainable language which produces unreadable, unmaintainable code.

Sometimes you need to leave things behind, even get rid of things you have loved much to better your life. :-)

By: Andrew Rodland

Andrew Rodland — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:16:16 +0000

I want Perl 5 to be a better language for new development.
I want Perl 5 to be more maintainable.
I want Perl 5 to be what the community wants it to be.
I want Perl 5 to live long and prosper, and not be what we use to mark time while we wait for Perl 6 to descend from the heavens.