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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Talking with Alan Burlison about Perl v PHP, Solaris v Linux 4 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Insisting on staying compatible with technology which is simply too old? Maybe the 5.5 compatibility habit was developed when 5.6 came out. Perhaps we should drop 5.5 (and even start sharpening the axe for 5.6) once 5.10 arrives.

    Perl has *actually* changed in that time. Being compatible means programming with your hands tied behind your back.

    And then there's ExtUtils::MakeMaker, which apparently is the favored installer of 99.9% of CPAN users (at least, if you take the default options of CPAN or CPANPLUS.)

    I'm wondering if the "perl is getting old" observation is actually about the community. There is a lot of wisdom, but also a lot of set-in-their-ways.

    Lately, I'm feeling somewhat "sick of Perl" myself. On deeper inspection, I'm actually just sick of trying to change the world. But alas, Perl is still the best language linguistically, so I guess I'm stuck trying to explain to others in the community that it does indeed have such modern conveniences as exception handling and Module::Build.

    I dunno, ruby wins because you get a fresh start on creating all of the cruft all over again (though they're well on their way at this point.) And PHP wins because 99% of the works of Shakespeare are valid code.

    There's also the fact that perl is the "strong, silent type", and the bit where PHP was an easy-to-install templating language. It did manage to botch PUT and DELETE almost as badly as CGI.pm (which was about the only competition at the time, no?)

    • Being compatible means programming with your hands tied behind your back.

      How dare you use a feature as simple and nice as lexical filehandles in a CPAN module, you fascist! It is my right as someone who demonstratably does not upgrade to have the option to upgrade to code written this millennium, you pig!

    • WRT compatibility, it will be interesting to see from the results of the Perl Survey [perlsurvey.org] how many people still use the older versions we're so slavishly adhering to.
    • If ExtUtils::MakeMaker still got the upper hand on Module::Build like CPAN does compared to CPANPLUS, it's because they work flawlessly (if you accept its quirks).

      I believe the greater problems with M::B and CPANPLUS is one of resistance, not enough feedback for authors, and maybe lack of developers' time (like in the recent thread discussing Parrot). They are supposed to be better than their counterparts, but they are not there yet.

      The support for EU::MM is omniscient. The support for M::B is not the

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