> Perl 7 there was a mutiny by jealous and bitter collaborators
Look, I hate to harsh on Sawyer X-- he's done a bunch of good stuff for perl over the years, and I hope to see him around again-- but his Perl 7 push was just a mess. He was getting frustrated about things, and tried to plan and push through some big changes before anyone could complain, but he wasn't really that clear on what the big changes were supposed to be-- he left a couple of weeks to figure it out after that big announcement, and even the inner cabal he had talked to about this stuff first seemed more than a little surprised.
One of the major things we got out of all this is it made it clear we needed some work on improved processes and transparency and such, and that's actually happened. There's a steering committee that makes a point of publishing its minutes, and an RFC process to talk over proposed changes. Some of these changes are in fact actually happening, and a number of them are discussed in this v5.36 annoucement (e.g. subroutine signatures are no longer experimental).
This actually seems like a really bright crew in charge, and they're making very sane decisions.
There's really no reason to think that there's some great benefit to breakage-on-upgrade: its a solution in search of a problem.
Perl has a fast, powerful well-integrated regular expression engine, with full unicode support.
In general, Perl tends to be much faster than the competing scripting languages (which is why you never see people talk about benchmark numbers, they'd give you the wrong answer).
Yes, most of them relatively minor though, which is why the OP has never stumbled across one.
(I found one once-- it turned out one coder had invented his own hash slice syntax. It wasn't supposed to work, but it did, until a particular upgrade...).
In general, Perl has been traditionally committed to backwards compatibility, but not fanatically so-- there is a deprecation cycle that can be used to remove the more problematic things.
Agree completely. Larry Wall is pretty brilliant, but he shouldn't be doing graphics design.
Actually, I tend to dislike cutsey-poo cartoon icons, in general. If you want to pick an animal totem, there are plenty of public domain photos of actual animals courtesy of the NSF and such...
I think quite a few people are confused by the line about it becoming Perl 7 "sometime in the future". I think it is unlikely that that is the distant future, myself. I think the main hang-up is they'd like to get the new built-in object system (Corinna) working.
If you're a "move fast and break things" kind-of guy, watching the perl devs in action will annoy you, because they're committed to not breaking things, and if they have to move slow to avoid it, they will.
On the other hand, if you want to be sloppy with your own perl code, or work with CPAN modules that move faster, that's up to you.
> It should be easy to always stay on the latest language version
With perl you can upgrade your language version whenever you like, and do it reasonably safely, because there's a lot of emphasis on backwards compatibility.
Perl may actually have a "always gimme the latest features" option, but I don't know what it is, because things like that aren't really that popular in the perl world-- we want old code to keep working the way it always has.
> Perl devs would be in a better situation with a "fiasco" like that.
Well, the hang-up in the roll out of "Perl 6" (now, Raku) gave people ammunition to shout about how "Perl is dead", but the central trouble was a lot of people wanted to spread that word. Myself, I think the success of a weirdo outsider language was making some insiders very upset, and they were fighting back any way they could.
Supporting older, variant behavior isn't really causing problems for the devs, from what I hear, when it does they go after it with the deprecation cycle.
Look, I hate to harsh on Sawyer X-- he's done a bunch of good stuff for perl over the years, and I hope to see him around again-- but his Perl 7 push was just a mess. He was getting frustrated about things, and tried to plan and push through some big changes before anyone could complain, but he wasn't really that clear on what the big changes were supposed to be-- he left a couple of weeks to figure it out after that big announcement, and even the inner cabal he had talked to about this stuff first seemed more than a little surprised.
One of the major things we got out of all this is it made it clear we needed some work on improved processes and transparency and such, and that's actually happened. There's a steering committee that makes a point of publishing its minutes, and an RFC process to talk over proposed changes. Some of these changes are in fact actually happening, and a number of them are discussed in this v5.36 annoucement (e.g. subroutine signatures are no longer experimental).
This actually seems like a really bright crew in charge, and they're making very sane decisions.
There's really no reason to think that there's some great benefit to breakage-on-upgrade: its a solution in search of a problem.