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Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

([Development] Jul 3, 2020 18:32 UTC (Fri) (corbet))


Dan Book has done [1]a detailed analysis of the [2]Perl 7 transition . " Large amount of CPAN modules will not work in Perl 7; plans for working around this would either involve every affected CPAN author, which is a virtual impossibility for the stated 1 year time frame; or the toolchain group, a loose group of people who each maintain various modules and systems that are necessary for CPAN to function, who either have not been consulted as of yet or have not revealed their plans related to the tools they maintain. Going into this potential problem sufficiently would be longer than this blog post, but suffice to say that a Perl where highly used CPAN modules don't seamlessly work is not Perl. "



[1] http://blogs.perl.org/users/grinnz/2020/07/perl-7-a-risk-benefit-analysis.html

[2] https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

At first I thought someone already published a book, and my first thought was, “Wow! That was quick!” :-)

The biggest pain in the behind when transitioning to a new Perl release usually is that a small obscure module which is a fourth-order dependency to a library you absolutely need, breaks.

The problem is not endemic to Perl, but while in Javascript modules grow and die overnight like weeds, Perl modules are like oak trees in the forest, decade-old ones are considered relatively new, and if the maintainer responds to you in the same quarter you wrote to them, it’s considered a quick response.

It’s more likely, though, that the module’s author has moved on to something else. Or that the module is a hostage of a feud between prominent “community members”. (My god, they are the reason I despise being a part of any “community”.) The efforts to give new life to such modules and bolt-on something like this to CPAN do look like they were bolted on and clunky (alt::Devel::CallParser::ButWorking, really?)

The whole illusion that CPAN is really comprehensive is hinged on the fact that Perl is extremely backwards-compatible. Introduce a slight incompatibity you cannot mitigate with an env variable or a clever option you can propagate down to all call levels, and the house of cards falls.

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

At first I thought someone already published a book, and my first thought was, “Wow! That was quick!” :-)

The biggest pain in the behind when transitioning to a new Perl release usually is that a small obscure module which is a fourth-order dependency to a library you absolutely need, breaks.

The problem is not endemic to Perl, but while in Javascript modules grow and die overnight like weeds, Perl modules are like oak trees in the forest, decade-old ones are considered relatively new, and if the maintainer responds to you in the same quarter you wrote to them, it’s considered a quick response.

It’s more likely, though, that the module’s author has moved on to something else. Or that the module is a hostage of a feud between prominent “community members”. (My god, they are the reason I despise being a part of any “community”.) The efforts to give new life to such modules and bolt-on something like this to CPAN do look like they were bolted on and clunky (alt::Devel::CallParser::ButWorking, really?)

The whole illusion that CPAN is really comprehensive is hinged on the fact that Perl is extremely backwards-compatible. Introduce a slight incompatibity you cannot mitigate with an env variable or a clever option you can propagate down to all call levels, and the house of cards falls.

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

What happened to Perl 6?

I'm still waiting for it. What did I miss?

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

What happened to Perl 6?

I'm still waiting for it. What did I miss?

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

It’s called Raku now and to date I’ve heard of no production code it’s running.

Book: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis

It’s called Raku now and to date I’ve heard of no production code it’s running.

The Worst American Poet
Julia Moore, "the Sweet Singer of Michigan" (1847-1920) was so bad that
Mark Twain said her first book gave him joy for 20 years.
Her verse was mainly concerned with violent death -- the great fire
of Chicago and the yellow fever epidemic proved natural subjects for her pen.
Whether death was by drowning, by fits or by runaway sleigh, the
formula was the same:
Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life
(in the) Ashbula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died.
Even if you started out reasonably healthy in one of Julia's poems,
the chances are that after a few stanzas you would be at the bottom of a
river or struck by lightning. A critic of the day said she was "worse than
a Gatling gun" and in one slim volume counted 21 killed and 9 wounded.
Incredibly, some newspapers were critical of her work, even
suggesting that the sweet singer was "semi-literate". Her reply was
forthright: "The Editors that has spoken in this scandalous manner have went
beyond reason." She added that "literary work is very difficult to do".
-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"