Perl 2011: Where are we now?

Piers Cawley wrote an excellent forward looking piece The Perl Future in January 2009. As we approach the two year mark, how have we fared? He talks about perl 6, perl 5.10.0, aka "perl5 version 10," Perl Enlightenment & the rise of Moose, and "on frameworks and the future."

Where are we now?

Perl 5.12 is out, as scheduled, on time -- two years of work representing 750,000 lines of changes over 3000 files and 200 authors. Deprecated features of perl4&5 are finally marked as such. More Unicode improvements. Features improvements for the Y2038 bug (is epoch time 64 bit now ?) Includes pluggable keywords and syntax. A new release schedule means stable releases come out in the spring, followed by a .1 fix release, then monthly releases (on the 20th) for new bug fixes.

Perl 6 released a real, honest to goodness release candidate. Rakudo Star, "A useable perl6 release" was released in June, aimed at "Perl 6 early adopters." Rakudo star has seen monthly updates, most recently Rakudo Star 2010.11 released in November 2011. Rakudo Perl is a specific implementation of Perl 6 the language, this Rakudo Star 2010.11 release includes "release #35 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2.10.1 of the Parrot Virtual Machine, and various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community."

A year-and-a-half of the Perl Iron Man blogging project has seen a flurry of posts from nearly 250 perl bloggers! We've seen advocacy, snippets, whining, and community. I've seen a lot more Japanese language perl posts -- folks happy to use perl, python and ruby and pull the best from each.

I now find it strange and unsettling to meet self proclaimed perl programmers who don't use Moose. If you haven't played with it (and it does feel like playing, it's liberatingly fun), go do so now. I'll wait.

I don't know about you, but I just switched from one startup using perl to another startup using perl. Awesome perl folks are hard to find, they're mostly already busy doing work they love. Why are we using perl? -- because perl works, it scales with developer time, and perl is beautiful.

Piers mentioned frameworks -- yes individual frameworks are important but the vast armada of options available at CPAN as a whole provide an immense multiplier on developer productivity. It's so massive, it is easy to overlook -- Doesn't everyone have a massive, distributed, user-written body of code with excellent testing methodology available at the touch of a button?

Merry Christmas to all!

[...snip...]
However, if you look at the good parts (O'Reilly haven't announced "Perl: The Good Parts", but it's a book that's crying out to be written), there's a really nice language in there. Arguably there's at least two. There's the language of the one-liner, the quick throwaway program written to achieve some sysadmin related task, and there's the more 'refined' language you use when you're writing something that is going to end up being maintained.

I think it's this split personality that can put people off the language. They see the line noise of the one liner school of programming, the games of Code Golf (originally called Perl golf, the idea spread), the obfuscated Perl contests, the terrible code that got written by cowboys and people who didn't know any better in the dotcom bubble (you can achieve an surprising amount with terrible Perl code, but you will hit the wall when you try and change it) and they think that's all there is.

But there is another Perl. It's a language that runs The Internet Movie Database, Slashdot, Booking.com, Vox.com, LiveJournal and HiveMinder. It's a language which enables people to write and maintain massive code-bases over years, supporting developers with excellent testing and documentation. It's a language you should be considering for your next project. It's also something of a blue sky research project - at least, that's how some people see Perl 6.

----http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Healthcheck-Perl-The-Perl-Future-746527.html

TEDxCALTECH -- Friday, January 14, 2010

"Feynman's Vision -- The next 50 years"

TEDx, the independent TED event series is coming to Caltech in January. TEDx events are inspired by TED and use the same plans and speaking formats. I'm surprised I haven't heard more buzz about this event. I wasn't able to get into TEDxUSC, the first of the TEDx events. I'll be volunteering for the event and hope to see you there!

Will we see coverage of Feynman's vision of the "race to the bottom" -- his challenge to his engineering and scientist peers to work together and compete to see how small we can go in nanotech. Will anyone from Professor Tai's micro-machine lab be speaking? I'm sure we'll see interesting wetware - bio/cs/eng research, given the Institute's focus on Bio over the past decade.

You won't know until you go! (Or until you check the speakers tab)

Feynman's Vision -- The next 50 years.

TEDxCaltech is a community of people who are passionate about sharing "Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years." If that sounds like something you want to be a part of, complete and submit the application below. Due to limited venue space, we cannot approve all applicants instantaneously. If you are approved, you will receive an email shortly either inviting you to register for the event, or letting you know that you are on the waiting list. The registration fee is $25 for Caltech students; $65 for Caltech faculty, staff, postdocs, alumni and JPL; and $85 for all others. The all-inclusive day will begin with breakfast and will be punctuated with generous breaks for food and conversation with fellow attendees. It promises to be an exciting and entertaining intellectual adventure—a time to unplug from the day-to-day routine. You won’t want to miss a minute!

Registration opens at 8:00 am, doors open at 9:30 am, talks conclude at 6:00 pm and will be followed by a reception. Parking is free.
-- http://www.tedxcaltech.com/apply

Perl, alive and kicking

Odds are, you didn't read about the 5.12 release outside of Ryan Paul's overview on Ars Technica. You see, Perl not being dead and just continuing business as usual doesn't make for compelling news. Also, let's admit, the Perl community has a great deal of competence in producing software, but couldn't market its way out of a soaking wet paper bag.

--Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering, ActiveState.

Interesting read over at ostatic.com, a guest piece by Jeff Hobbs. This topic is a proverbial discussion point in the perl community and has heated up quite a bit over the past year or two, "how to better market the awesomeness of perl?" It's hard to evangelize when we're busy getting stuff done. This article provides a nice collection of the arguments why 'perl is still relevant.'

Disclosure: ActiveState produces a professionally packaged perl for windows, so they are of course a bit biased into the pro-perl camp. (And they may be feeling some pressure from Vanilla perl now shipping a "normal" perl for windows).