What's the future of Perl? Let's look ahead five years to the possibilities.
(Note: once upon a time I believed that "Perl" referred to a language family, but I've changed my mind. When I use the word "Perl", I refer to the language that has versions 1 - 5. The thing called "Perl 6" should change its name.
Who Uses What
- No one uses anything Perlish for new projects.
- Some people use Perl and some people use Perl 6.
- Most people use Perl and almost no one uses Perl 6.
- Most people use Perl 6.
What do they use it for?
- New development.
- Maintenance of existing projects.
- Porting from other languages.
What's the relationship of Perl to Perl 6?
- One has subsumed the other.
- One has failed and the other has survived.
- Perl is becoming Perl 6 as much as possible.
- Perl 6 allows you to use Perl in process.
What New Features Does Perl Have?
- A foreign function interface
- A real object system with syntax and everything
- An improved exception system
- An improved concurrency system
- Function signatures
- Grammars
- Junctions
- Strictures by default
- None of these
- All of these
Do You Still Use Perl?
- Yes
- No
Is Perl Healthier Then Than Now?
- Yes
- No
With all of your answers, you have a decision to make. Do you like this future? If so, great!
If not (and here I admit to some concern myself), how can we make the future more appealing?
Strange no one commented so far. Was this a rhetoric question?
I don't think there is some extraordinary thing we need to do. Just continue doing the good things you have been doing. A few of them that came to my mind:
I use Perl 5 since 1992 (almost 20 years! :) ), I love it and try to use it in every new projects @home and @$work. The first missing thing that come to mind after all these years, is to have a real object system based on Moose (which is a wonderful object system) included in core, compact and fast, possibly with function/method signatures (your "method" patch is a good starting point :) )
We can do fabulous thinks with perl, we now have many modules that allow us to make great applications (yes applications, not scripts), like events frameworks (AnyEvent, POE, ...), web frameworks (Catalyst, Mojolicious, Dancer, ...), integrating each in the others (see Twiggy for example).
It can even be used in embedded platform, we do it at work. What else? :)
And it is fast, to develop and to run!
Every day, I try to demonstrate this fact at work with concrete results. The Planet Perl Iron Man blogs aggregator is a good think and confirm the revival of the Perl community.
I hope Perl 6 will be soon usable in production, this new language is awesome. But at this time, I stay concentrated on Perl 5...
Do You Still Use Perl ? YES of course!
Is Perl Healthier Then Than Now ? Healthier than never!