“Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the the Perl Porters, have taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly academic languages and blended them with Perl’s pragmatic view to practicality and usefulness.”
I know many people have been dying to see the pearl-y gates updated!
“in over give years”
“give years” eh? Don’t get me wong, I love OS News, but there havs been typo after typo latly. What’is the deel?
…?
Actually, I’m with the OP on this one. I don’t have a problem with typos per se, but their regular presence is a sure sign of sloppy/non-existant editing processes, as are news summaries that only link to the source through 5 other news websites.
I’m NOT complaining, after all, I don’t pay for the privilege of reading news here. But it would be a shame to undermine the professionalism of the rest of the site with these simple errors.
It is just a copied error
But is this better?
Personally, I’m waiting until Debian packages perl 5.10 before I use it in production code, but I’ve started using it for throwaway scripts while it was still called 5.9. And I love it!
Particularly interesting is Perl’s approach to the switch statement: a truly dynamic solution that goes much further than equivalence testing. It uses a new mechanism dubbed “smart matching”, which also has a binary operator: “~~”.
Regex fanatics will love the new recursive patterns, counter resetting group, and numerous optimizations. Shell users will probably very quickly get used to using “perl -E” instead of “perl -e” for their oneliners. perl -E’say “Hello World!”‘
I thought that she’d been put to sleep a long time ago. There’s so little perl news nowadays. Only jokes about the vaporware king of the free software universe…. i know perl 5-5.8 is used extensively and I haven nothing bad to say about the language at all … it’s just reading this post makes it feel like I am seeing a ghost.
Are you kidding? I see Perl job requests all over the place.
Perl is also used extensively in the Finance industry, special effects industry and also in sysadmin roles. I am aware of that. But you don’t hear much about it do you? The same way you don’t hear much about C++ nowadays, do you? When perl6 does finally come out would it still be relevant, will it have achieved it’s lofty ideals – seeing that python,ruby,php overlap with it’s efforts and that functional programming ideas are not exactly the staple of a lot of the programmers out there. There is hope,so do not despair,3D Realms have just released Duke Nukem forever , the teaser trailer, 5.10 is like the 6 teaser …. i hope the similarities end there tho
“Perl is also used extensively in the Finance industry”
I have some personal experience with that unfortunately. The use of Perl in production environments has led to some painful issues, mainly due to its tendency to become obfuscated and incomprehensible, which is the last thing you want when the crap hits the fan several minutes before market-open and even guy who originally wrote the script struggles to understand it.
I’ve found that the environment tends to be more supportable with simple shell scripts and occasionally Python for the more complex stuff, especially when we are under pressure to rapidly diagnose and address an immediate production issue.
You can write ugly code in any language. As someone else (I forgot who) put it: messy Python code looks clean, messy Perl just looks messy.
As the old saying goes, “You can write Fortran in any language.” Both languages are great, and people can code either well. That said, Python encourages clean code, whereas Perl, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it encourages messy code, at least does not discourage it either.
In other words, while the programmer’s still at fault, IMHO Perl is the equivalent to putting an alcoholic in a bar while telling him to only drink soda, while Python puts the alcoholic into a brightly-colored candy store instead.
Won’t buy that.
We have developed an IVR product, counting over million lines of code. The trainees of the project once trained in Perl and exposed to the coding style, have always picked up and maintained it on their own. Would approach us only for functional queries!
So, IF you are a programmer what did you do about it? If you did nothing, I blame you not Perl. It is never the fault of Perl that the code is bad it is the fault of the programmers.
While you may be able to do everything in Perl, it doesn’t mean the you always should. While the Perl defenders will claim that it is always the fault of the programmer, which is true since the code isn’t writing itself, it does not negate the fact that Perl is a language that lends itself particularly well to incomprehensible code. Certainly far more so than Ruby or Python.
But each to their own. There needs to be an appreciation of the applicability of differing programming languages to differing problems and environments. Perl has its place, along with its good and bad points, as do all other languages.
Have a look at sysadmin positions. You must have lived in a cave all these years.
Took me a while to find the actual details of the changes:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perldelta.html
well .. days went by and nobody said: thanks
so I guess I speak for a few
Thanks you !
Pretty useful !
I remember (many, many moons ago!) hearing wonderful stories about how perl6 (codename parrot) was coming along, and that mere mortals would weep at it’s power, speed and beauty. There were even some stories about how the register based Parrot ‘VM’ could run java code faster than a JVM!
Whatever happened to our supercharged Parrot beauty?
According to someone I work with, who is part of perl6, they are expecting a real release sometime next week.
Next week??!? Call me a sceptic, but I reckon they’ll save the announcement until April 1st….
No I imagine sometime later in the year.
Heh. Certainly not.
D’oh. I meant next year.
Parrot is not the codename for Perl 6.
Parrot is the virtual machine that’s being built for Perl 6, but is intended to also run Ruby, Python, PHP, etc.
This register based VM actually already exists and is nearing its final shape.
AFAICT, Audrey (project leader) has been deathly ill for the last few months.
I can’t wait for it, and I’m waiting for FreeBSD ports guys to update it!