use Perl

• You're about 6 years late :) (Score:2)

  by hfb (74)

  Rarely, very rarely, since Perl6 was announced has there been any funding for Perl5 projects. P6 is the money pit into which most funding disappears into and has been so for quite some time. Some years ago I tried valiantly to get TPF to set up separate funds, at least one for p6 funding and possibly one for p5 funding, so that those who still wanted to fund p5 or who wanted to fund p6 exclusively could do so. That never happened. P5 isn't dead, it's just very, very stable. :)

  Gnat was being honest and, r
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    It's fortunate that he does at least recognise that people move on.
    
    It's quite obvious at this point that for those people that are interested in the beauty of the language syntax itself, there's younger and sexier languages out there now.
    
    Most of the Perl 5 people I see around are pragmatists who care mostly about solving problems effectively, rather than language geeks.
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by rafael (2125)

    Very stable? Well, no. The grants commitee [perlfoundation.org] contains many Perl 5 people, many Perl 5 projects have been founded (including Nicholas' work on the internals), and with the implementation of three new features in bleadperl this month (_ prototype, UNITCHECK blocks, qx// overriding), I really hope to see 5.10 out in a few months. There is not much work left on it.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Alias (5735)

      There's a few places in which I disagree with you.
      
      5.10 blesses Module::Build as core, and in my opinion it's just not ready. There's still fairly significant problems still to be resolved. And this isn't just a small issue either, because all of CPAN sits on top of the toolchain modules.
      
      There's a few other things like CPANPLUS that still need work too.
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by TeeJay (2309)

    You seem to be ignoring CPAN-space - i.e. much of Perl5 development is no longer in the core for the obvious reason that the API is stable, it works well and non-language geeks need libraries to solve their problems instead of new syntax or behaviour.
    
    As it happens I'm still maintaining Maypole - it was funded by a TPF grant a couple of years ago, and it rejuvinated the Perl (and other language) Application Server space, and now we have Catalyst, Jifty and others, and these in turn have pushed the ORM space

    --
    
    @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
    print reverse @JAPH;
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Abigail (26)

    P5 isn't dead, it's just very, very stable.

    Indeed. The first six years of Perl5, we got a new release about once a year. 5.6 was released in spring 2000. In summer, the perl6 movement started. Summer 2002, over four years ago, saw the last major release of perl5.

    No wonder people move on.
• No no its not (Score:1)

  by demerphq (2831)

  I've been putting in full time labour into the regular expression engine and Win32 perl. So currently Perl5 has at least one full time unpaid developer working on it. Thats in addition to the other volunteer developers that dont have the luxury of working fulltime for free. (I wont have the luxury for much longer.) Whatever TPF is doing Perl5 is very not dead. Yves
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by bart (450)

    Yes yes your work on the regexp engine is very exciting. But people who are looking for something new (and, aren't we all?) aren't very excited with just a faster implementation — even if the speed doubles. They want new features. Like, a regex engine that can parse recursive patterns.
    
    But, I thought I heard you were working on that too?
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matts (1087)

      Yes, that and more is coming in perl 5.10. Named matches, engine hints (to tell it to stop backtracking), recursive regexps, and more.
      
      I'm damned excited by it all.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hex (3272)

        Hooray!