Well done and thank you to everyone putting out Perl releases and working on this still great language. Way back in the 90's I had the misfortune to use C to process large amounts of textual information (addresses), cleaning it up before shovelling into a database. I wish I had had the good fortune to have found Perl back then.
In the late 90s I learnt Perl precisely because I didn't want to do a job in C (simple CGI stuff) and it was the only other alternative on the particular server I was working on.
Perl is still my go to for processing large amounts of text or to create some script that will still work well into the next ice age. The backwards compatibility is one of the best features IMHO.
Ditto! For the same reason Perl is my go to language for everything I do that I do not have to share. When I have to work with others it will have to be Python (in the best cases) or R (in the less good cases).
It seemed like a really interesting project, but they really screwed up with the marketing, firstly by calling it Perl 6 and secondly by never giving a date when it would be ready. I am using Python these days.
I often think that the reason why PHP is still so popular compared to Perl is because php never stopped evolving.
If php had paused development or even slowed it down like this it would also have been far less popular as probably even frameworks like Symfony and Laravel won't be possible with the older versions of php.
So thank you to the maintainers but I wish Perl evolved more quickly like PHP.
I actually prefer Perl's stability. And, anyway, it's a dynamic language: you can create stuff without requiring changes to the compiler.
For a long time I worked with Java and it became very tiresome to have to learn a new framework for every new job. Java was my main tool between versions 1.02 and 1.6.
PHP had a huge range of intrinsics specifically targeted at processing web input with web like patterns and configuration. PERL is about one thing: munging text data with minimal syntax. Granted you can do all sort of things with it, but its main strength has been as a practical extraction and reporting language.
Sort of. It caused a kerfuffle, and so it was decided to continue with 5.x until there's a big enough change to make the jump (and who knows if any such change will ever come). Quote:
"At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. If that happens, then the version will be bumped to 7.0."
I used to keep track of what version of Linux we'd be on if we'd stopped arbitrarily revving major versions. Just making this up now, but like 2.102 or some such.
