whats the latest gossip on Perl 6?

[jephthah]

has it been officially canned?

[Kendustin]

As far as I know Perl 6 is still undergoing constant refinement and refactoring. It's still having plenty of bugs and lacking in functionality area. It still says that it has not been implemented yet.

[mitchems]

It's still being developed. But it seems that in the 10 years since they have been working on it, perl has been eclipsed on the web by PHP (for smaller sites) and either Ruby on Rails or Java for larger sites. Yeah, there's Mason, which I used to develop an application that I still maintain and is pretty fast and flexible (and better/faster than CGI.pm because it uses mod_perl). I mean, Amazon.com uses Mason. But it seems many programmers have abandoned perl for web programming. I still use perl just about every day for scripting purposes, yet the web seems to have moved on. Perhaps if perl 6 had been delivered in a more timely fashion, things would not be the way that they are.

[masijade]

Perl is not only for websites. In fact, that is the least that it's meant for, so all of that means, essentially, nothing. In fact, its not meant for that, at all, not anymore than simple shell scripts are (which function just as well for CGI). Sure, there's a few modules for it, but it is still far from its intended purpose. I'm sorry, but its true.

[mitchems]

I was only pointing out that 15 years ago perl was a very widely-used tool for the web. Like I said I use perl just about every day for non-web related tasks. I also have used Mason for the web. I personally find perl to be my favorite language and I know Java, PHP, Ruby and some others. 15 years ago, before Java existed, perl was widely used in a CGI environment. I don't believe I said that perl was ONLY for websites, just that perl is less-used on the web than it once was.

[masijade]

And I just pointed out that, IMHO, that was irrelevant.

[mitchems]

Well, if you look at the traffic in other groups - Java, C++ and others - here on Daniweb, it seems that perl is a less-used language than many. We get about 2-3 posts a day - many of them from students learning perl for the first time. I was only offering one explanation as to why perl has fallen into less-usage.

This thread started with a question about perl 6. The fact that it has taken 10 years to develop perl 6 seems to me to have hurt the perl community. That, and the rise of other languages that have eclipsed perl (especially on the web). I started writing in perl because I hated sed and awk and perl was more flexible and powerful than either, not for the web. Yet I did use it for CGI programming years ago.

[jephthah]

Perl was once widely described as "the duct tape that holds the internet together"... that's not the case anymore.

sure, Perl is still being used by some application developers, and is still widely used in egacy systems.... but i agree it's been eclipsed. many new applications that might have once been written in Perl are now written in PHP, Python, or Ruby.

[masijade]

I have also used perl widely in a wide variety of tasks, but I don't believe 6 will ever come out. Or, at least, I'll believe it when I see it. The language is far from dead, but it is also far from mainstream. That happens to all languages, eventually, and the reasons for it are always varied. All I can say is, don't sit on one language and expect to "make your bread" with it your entire life. You need to continually change to survive in this industry.

[masijade]

Perl was once widely described as "the duct tape that holds the internet together"... that's not the case anymore.

And that statement shows just how "unfit" it was for the task (after all, even though it sometims works, duct tape is never the answer). Then again, everything was at that time. I don't think anyone ever believed that Perl was going to hold strong in that area. It was destined to become "outdated" for the task, even if it had only taken 2 years for 6 to come out. As I have already said, simple shell scripts were just as good (and just as widely used) as Perl for CGI purposes, and that's not a good sign.

[mitchems]

Well, I certainly agree that shell scripts (and batch files and whatnot) were never good for that task. Yet perl is amazing with strings. SQL and webpages are basically strings. IMO (and that's real - it's IMO) is that perl could have been and once was very powerful for the web because of the string manipulation stuff. Yet, hey, what is done is done. It's probably nobody"s "fault" in this arena. Ruby on Rails did something quite powerful - adding a framework to an interpreted, object-oriented language that is web-friendly. I wasn't trying to say that Perl was the best web language, only that it has fallen out of favor. I think Larry Wall was offered Yahoo! options because, at the time, perl was the king of the web. Yet, if you look at Larry's webpage, clearly he doesn't even use Perl to process his stuff. I guess my point was the sad reality of the decline (?) of perl - except for the hard-core people.

[jephthah]

so, here's what i get from the Perl 6 debate, or lack thereof:

Perl might be a good language to know if your job includes maintaining legacy systems, but it would behoove programmers to let it go as much as possible ...

... and for those of you who don't already know Perl, it would probably be an unwise use of your time to learn it.

i'm not gloating. Perl was powerful and a lot of fun. I'm actually pissed that Wall & his inner circle neglected it and let it die. a good product whose chief architect is the figurehead of some cult of personality where vanity has apparently trumped ability.

:(

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