This is not a master plan. This is not The Perl Foundation. This site and these people do not speak for the Perl community or its core developers.
The whole site is run by Will Braswell, the creator and maintainer of RPerl, and Reini Urban, the creator and maintainer of CPerl. Both are increasingly troublesome to the Perl community. Rather than apologizing and reintegrating to the community, they've decided to start their own separate community where they are the leaders without disclosing the fact that they are speaking for this new, separate party.
Will and Reini have effectively been cut out of the main line perl community for repeatedly being assholes to anybody who dared to disagree with them about anything (and I mean being assholes by my standards, which I hope at least some readers will recognise as a rather high bar to clear).
When the website was first created there was a ripple across the social media presences of assorted significant perl/cpan people, myself included, decrying it, though it's non trivial to search for because most of us deliberately didn't include the URL to avoid signal boosting its existence any more than strictly necessary.
The general consensus among my fellow cpan authors (including core team members of some of the most widely used projects) is basically a superposition of
1) "Oh for fuck's sake, not them again"
and
2) "The only way this could've been more tone deaf and counter productive is if instead of a 'master plan' they'd called it a 'final solution'"
There's lots of things happening of late that I'm very optimistic about. This shit is basically the Tulsi Gabbard of perl futures. I respect the right of the authors to hold their opinions, but I respect nothing about said opinions and would encourage everybody else not to feed the trolls.
Thanks. I strongly suggest constructive competition which will benefit all of us. In addition to that, I also suggest that somebody can have a high order review of how the dispute evolved so a better protocol can eventually developed to make an eco-system healthier. Or even more, study the weakness of human nature so a more efficient cooperative system can be created by promoting awareness of troublesome behaviors/features.
This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what Perl needs: more Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a language are the ways that language satisfies what users and developers need.
If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.
There are a lot of "ideal" languages out there that are overwhelmingly under used - haskell, erlang, etc.
Meanwhile, Javascript and Python are eating everyone's lunches. .NET and Swift are doing pretty well too, but JS in particular is derided as a "bad" language with tons of problems, yet it's bursting at the seams with developers. How can this be so?
Frankly, it's because you can take a random person off the street and turn them into a decent JS developer in like two weeks. JS may be formally inconsistent, but it's seems easy enough for most people to get it. It's quick to see and get results, so new developers don't get discouraged.
If Perl wants to be popular, it needs to attract users on how easy it is. This was one of the shifts Python has made over the years (getting easier for new users) and it continues to grow its userbase.
Language popularity is almost exclusively driven by the ability for MBA's to hire cheap, mediocre/bad programmers to slash away at garbage heap codebases in said language, while endlessly billing customers for 'fixes/improvements'. If you have a good team with good tools, you have less billing to do and maybe not enough people to justify convoluted management structures and practices.
Good languages are fundamentally at odds with how most software companies do business. They don't want to train people, they don't want to do rewrites, and they definitely don't want to hire people who can change jobs at the drop of a hat (highly skilled persons). They want the bare minimum of all of that, and maximum billings.
Of course to reverse the trend Perl needs more programmers etc., but Perl for its own sake isn't really a compelling argument. The question really isn't "What's required to make Perl a more common language?" The question is, "Why should anyone choose Perl over another option?"
Certainly there's a "best tool for the job" approach that might suggest Perl for certain applications, but most of the time developers are saddled with using a single language for a task. Like choosing a hammer: You'd like to choose the one best suited for a job, but that job requires driving both 20d framing nails and brads and everything in between. Carrying an 18oz for the framing, a 10oz for the brads etc. isn't practical, so you choose the 18oz because it's the only one that will work for framing and you can still use the 18oz for the brads, you just need to use a light touch and be more careful.
All that said, I take it this article may not be entirely serious. If it had not been written by Larry Wall, I might take it as complete satire, as examples of the exact wrong reasons to champion a language.
A lot of people shitting on the website in this thread, but it seems to me like you guys are missing the point - this isn't a site targeted towards people who aren't using it currently - it's a site targeting the true believers to give them more concrete actions they can take to help spread the faith.
While there are some actionable pieces of advice on the page, a large percentage is misguided and if taken seriously would simply waste already strained resources. Mobile apps and 3D games in Perl 5? Might become someone’s toy, but good luck finding any adoption... Perl 5 taught in every high school? Give me a break...
The true believers are using perl. Neither rperl nor cperl is compatible with perl at this time, and the authors of both didn't so much burn their bridges as dynamite them on the way out of the mainstream community.
If it was simply what you thought it was, I'd be in favour. Instead, it's a cynical attempt to capitalise on the raku rename and draw off support from actual perl users to their weird-ass not-exactly-perl projects :(
If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language useful to the problems developers face today, the site deserves the criticism.
Aside from all the other excellent points about the motivations behind this group - this one sentence on the website is really a very silly move : 'Currently, most software courses teach either Python or (worse yet) Java'.
If you're trying to show that a language is good, don't slag off other languages just for the sake of it.
At best it makes unjustified suppositions. At worst it makes you look like a bitter zealot.
On my Macbook Pro parsing a 19Mb log file with a regex using the latest Perl 6 (Rakudo 2019.3) takes 8.3 times as long as Perl 5 and 5.1 times as long as Ruby 2.7, excluding startup time. Text processing is what made Perl famous so I can't see Perl 6 having a cat-in-hell's chance until performance improves significantly.
These guys are using mostly Perl 5 though. They basically forked 5 years ago and call it Perl 11. They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11 comes from 5+6=11). AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku and drop the link to 6 and let Perl 5 continue as it was with new development instead of Perl becoming a completely new language.
Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5.
I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.
It's worth reading. What I think it is is a power / money grab by a small group inside Perl. It's not reflective of the goals or desires of the wider Perl community. Or at least those goals and desires would not be presented in this way.
The real question is whether a programming language that has lost traction, mindshare, and focus ever gained it back? It's probably no coincidence that Python's rise was at the same time of Perl's stagnation.
I think what happened to Perl is that its approach (puns, whimsy, ornate symbols, multiple ways to do the same thing) suddenly became extremely unfashionable with the rise in popularity of more clean and simple languages like Python and Ruby (although Ruby had a much more whimsical US community in the past, it's not part of the core language community in the same way.)
Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like it's coming soon.
Python is actually a good example of such language. I feel like it started to stagnate around a decade ago(slow adoption of Python 3, poor packaging, Ruby on Rails winning over Django etc) but then it has reinvented itself in the area of ML/AI. Similarly but less impressively, Java 8 has slowed down the rate of flow of Java devs to newer languages.
I would say yes, but only in the form of a new language with differences from the older forms.
Scheme -> Racket
Common Lisp -> Clojure
ML -> Haskell
If perl followed this format and did a rebrand that is essentially the same thing, they would be more likely to pick up traction. Perl just in the name itself gives me a certain connotation. Typically the older variants of languages for the most part die off, while the newly branded ones gain traction, but carrying on the same basic mission. This last one is particularly sad to me personally the Standard ML ecosystem is still to this day incredibly robust and production-tier, and yet it is very much a dead language.
Honestly python won in large part because perl took over a decade to come out with perl 6. Knowing that there was a backwards-incompatible upgrade on the horizon shortly and having that be true for a decade meant that new projects in perl or major upgrades in perl were delayed and then shifted to projects in other languages. Python and ruby both were beneficiaries of this (especially with PHP going through a similar process with PHP 6 which took 5 years before being abandoned.)
There was a discussion on this a week ago in the Perl subreddit where some key community members (Ex: Ovid) chime in.
I think it is a good plan to make Perl faster, but I'd rather they pitch in and help Johnathan Worthington with the Perl6 (now Raku) effort. Perl5 is a good language, but there isn't enough to get me to switch from Python. Raku on the other hand is very cool and I can see the benefit.
Edit:
Perl6 (now Raku) isn't just a version change from Perl5, but is an entirely new and powerful language. It seems to have pulled some of the best aspects of Python, Ruby, Perl, and some things from Haskell/Lisp.
Never written a line of perl in my life, but this seems like total satire. They talk about “machine learning” trends and apps and putting classes in “every school.” It’s exaggerated and funny. Check out their linked site, “Teen Perl,” which has nothing but a splash page.
I've been following Perl Advent for a looong time.
The sad art is I don't code Perl anymore (at least 10-12 years) but I still visit perl advent every year.
> We are now developing the RPerl compiler, which provides startup optimization, serial runtime optimization, automatic parallelization, and memory usage minimization.
What would a modern high performance language look like though?
I see it at as a language with AOT compilation, high performance implementation of a decent actor concurrency model not shared memory one, vector/matrix abstractions, primitives and operations. At the same time I see automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance.
There are languages for which it makes sense to try to be the fastest at some set of things: fastest program initialization, fastest network socket library, fastest regular expressions. That's all nice, but in the vast majority of programming work, "fastest learning curve from hello,world to low-error-count CRUD program" is the best spec.
Perl actually has a shot at that, but there's nothing much special about it that couldn't be done by Python or Ruby.
I started using Perl back in 2007 for their text parsing capabilities, then moved to Python as more and more examples and libraries became available, I definitely enjoy both.
[+] [-] cestith|6 years ago|reply
The whole site is run by Will Braswell, the creator and maintainer of RPerl, and Reini Urban, the creator and maintainer of CPerl. Both are increasingly troublesome to the Perl community. Rather than apologizing and reintegrating to the community, they've decided to start their own separate community where they are the leaders without disclosing the fact that they are speaking for this new, separate party.
[+] [-] mst|6 years ago|reply
Will and Reini have effectively been cut out of the main line perl community for repeatedly being assholes to anybody who dared to disagree with them about anything (and I mean being assholes by my standards, which I hope at least some readers will recognise as a rather high bar to clear).
When the website was first created there was a ripple across the social media presences of assorted significant perl/cpan people, myself included, decrying it, though it's non trivial to search for because most of us deliberately didn't include the URL to avoid signal boosting its existence any more than strictly necessary.
The general consensus among my fellow cpan authors (including core team members of some of the most widely used projects) is basically a superposition of
1) "Oh for fuck's sake, not them again"
and
2) "The only way this could've been more tone deaf and counter productive is if instead of a 'master plan' they'd called it a 'final solution'"
There's lots of things happening of late that I'm very optimistic about. This shit is basically the Tulsi Gabbard of perl futures. I respect the right of the authors to hold their opinions, but I respect nothing about said opinions and would encourage everybody else not to feed the trolls.
-- mst, deeply unimpressed by this shit
[+] [-] jjcc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pierrebai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snapdangle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|6 years ago|reply
If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.
[+] [-] vorpalhex|6 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, Javascript and Python are eating everyone's lunches. .NET and Swift are doing pretty well too, but JS in particular is derided as a "bad" language with tons of problems, yet it's bursting at the seams with developers. How can this be so?
Frankly, it's because you can take a random person off the street and turn them into a decent JS developer in like two weeks. JS may be formally inconsistent, but it's seems easy enough for most people to get it. It's quick to see and get results, so new developers don't get discouraged.
If Perl wants to be popular, it needs to attract users on how easy it is. This was one of the shifts Python has made over the years (getting easier for new users) and it continues to grow its userbase.
[+] [-] sornaensis|6 years ago|reply
Good languages are fundamentally at odds with how most software companies do business. They don't want to train people, they don't want to do rewrites, and they definitely don't want to hire people who can change jobs at the drop of a hat (highly skilled persons). They want the bare minimum of all of that, and maximum billings.
[+] [-] agentultra|6 years ago|reply
I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the right time and app/platform exclusivity.
That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll ever see another popular language displace the status quo.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pressurefree|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
Certainly there's a "best tool for the job" approach that might suggest Perl for certain applications, but most of the time developers are saddled with using a single language for a task. Like choosing a hammer: You'd like to choose the one best suited for a job, but that job requires driving both 20d framing nails and brads and everything in between. Carrying an 18oz for the framing, a 10oz for the brads etc. isn't practical, so you choose the 18oz because it's the only one that will work for framing and you can still use the 18oz for the brads, you just need to use a light touch and be more careful.
All that said, I take it this article may not be entirely serious. If it had not been written by Larry Wall, I might take it as complete satire, as examples of the exact wrong reasons to champion a language.
[+] [-] clscott|6 years ago|reply
He is not speaking for the general Perl community
[+] [-] chaostheory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stone-monkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oefrha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mst|6 years ago|reply
If it was simply what you thought it was, I'd be in favour. Instead, it's a cynical attempt to capitalise on the raku rename and draw off support from actual perl users to their weird-ass not-exactly-perl projects :(
[+] [-] pimmen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leibnitz27|6 years ago|reply
If you're trying to show that a language is good, don't slag off other languages just for the sake of it.
At best it makes unjustified suppositions. At worst it makes you look like a bitter zealot.
[+] [-] dehrmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cutler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhenderson|6 years ago|reply
Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5.
I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.
[+] [-] 663e1b|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totalperspectiv|6 years ago|reply
It's worth reading. What I think it is is a power / money grab by a small group inside Perl. It's not reflective of the goals or desires of the wider Perl community. Or at least those goals and desires would not be presented in this way.
[+] [-] Saad_M|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like it's coming soon.
[+] [-] didymospl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threwawasy1228|6 years ago|reply
Scheme -> Racket Common Lisp -> Clojure ML -> Haskell
If perl followed this format and did a rebrand that is essentially the same thing, they would be more likely to pick up traction. Perl just in the name itself gives me a certain connotation. Typically the older variants of languages for the most part die off, while the newly branded ones gain traction, but carrying on the same basic mission. This last one is particularly sad to me personally the Standard ML ecosystem is still to this day incredibly robust and production-tier, and yet it is very much a dead language.
[+] [-] djhaskin987|6 years ago|reply
> * Perl as the fastest language > * Perl as the most popular language
You can't get the fastest language (assembly) and be the cognitively easiest and most popular language (Python), there's a trade-off there.
This is why Python won: it focused on what was most important for ease of maintainability and readability and left out everything else
[+] [-] twunde|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7thaccount|6 years ago|reply
I think it is a good plan to make Perl faster, but I'd rather they pitch in and help Johnathan Worthington with the Perl6 (now Raku) effort. Perl5 is a good language, but there isn't enough to get me to switch from Python. Raku on the other hand is very cool and I can see the benefit.
Edit:
Perl6 (now Raku) isn't just a version change from Perl5, but is an entirely new and powerful language. It seems to have pulled some of the best aspects of Python, Ruby, Perl, and some things from Haskell/Lisp.
[+] [-] robviren|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdmccormick|6 years ago|reply
Yes, they want to increase Perl adoption. No, they probably don't think they can realistically meet all those goals in the forseeable future.
[+] [-] jhfdbkofdcho|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lizmat|6 years ago|reply
perlpackages.com perlcontainers.com perlvm.com perlclouds.com perlaccessibility.com perlinstall.com perlgames.com perloffice.com perlapps.com perlservers.com perlgrandchallenges.com perlhackathons.com spacescouting.org perlscouts.com certifiedyouthprogrammer.com programmingmeritbadge.com mlperl.com scienceperl.com perldemos.com perljobs.work perllegacy.com perlpodcasts.com perlvideos.com perlbrochures.com perlflyers.com perlmerchandise.com perlpapers.com perlnewsroom.com perlblogs.com perlinfographics.com perlbeer.com perlparties.com perlconferences.com perlmulticore.com perlsupercomputers.com perlspeed.com perlfamily.org
[+] [-] Jenz|6 years ago|reply
Be it satire or not (which I think it actually isn’t), this is not a good sign.
[+] [-] zelly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deftturtle|6 years ago|reply
http://teenperl.com/
[+] [-] eb0la|6 years ago|reply
I've been following Perl Advent for a looong time. The sad art is I don't code Perl anymore (at least 10-12 years) but I still visit perl advent every year.
Let's see what happens this year :-)
[+] [-] zzzcpan|6 years ago|reply
What would a modern high performance language look like though? I see it at as a language with AOT compilation, high performance implementation of a decent actor concurrency model not shared memory one, vector/matrix abstractions, primitives and operations. At the same time I see automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting high performance.
[+] [-] dsr_|6 years ago|reply
Perl actually has a shot at that, but there's nothing much special about it that couldn't be done by Python or Ruby.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
Automatic parallelization hurts high performance? What do you mean - things like throttling when extremely high-end vector instructions are used?
[+] [-] orf|6 years ago|reply
I hope step 1 is to get a working TLS certificate.
Edit: Oh, I see. https serves the wrong site...
[+] [-] spicyramen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhd|6 years ago|reply
(Not saying that they're entirely wrong)