Point 2 is kind of nonsense. The ecosystem is incredibly big and keeps up with most things. Name something then search here https://metacpan.org/ The main missing stuff is anyone marketing heavily their libraries and there being communities around them etc. Like probably no one knows what PDL is, even though it was around long before numpy+scipy etc. Before data science trended in the mind of hipster VCs and coders. The naming was to try and win over people from the IDL language, used mostly in image analysis in physics/geography. A niche crowd to be sure. Perl sort of never caught on to the modern style of advertising what its got. In the same way no one really advertises grep, awk or sed but lots of people still learn and use them.
The size of the CPAN is certainly impressive. However, past a certain point, a big, multipurpose, monolithic Perl codebase being worked on by a ton of different developers is going to have significant problems caused specifically by the use of different CPAN libraries: many, many quite common libs do not "play well" with each other in quite simple cases. And I'm not talking about "I'm trying to glue together two third-party tools that weren't written with each other in mind", I'm talking "I have a request handler that once, an hour ago had to load and call a function in a given module, and is now issuing cryptic errors on all requests of a certain type because they happen to call a function in a different, totally unrelated module that worked before".
This is largely because of the sheer volume of weird global state inspections/mutations you can do in Perl--or I guess it's more accurate to say that Perl has a conveition of it being "OK" to heavily and frequently inspect and mutate global state. You can monkey patch in many languages, and sometimes it's even encouraged (Ruby), but only in Perl is it not uncommon to see monkeypatch removal or seriously altering replacement of core functionality. I've had modules hackily unload other already modules because the loaded modules' names matched a buggy load-time regex. I've had packages clobber text handling or encoding routines in other packages at compile time, or only after calling a certain function a certain way. I've had modules change the behavior of the core signal handling APIs so that any code that talked to them . . . didn't actually handle signals. And those are just the pithy examples that fit in a single sentence.
Now granted, this isn't a criticism of Perl-the-language but more of (depending on how you choose to interpret it) library authors who don't prioritize or even consider interoperability with other tools, or of Perl-the-community's conventions regarding when it's OK to go mess around in globally-stateful guts of code you don't control. You could also just as easily say that it's a symptom of the big, multipurpose monolith I had to maintain--which is valid, but other not-designed-for-huge-projects languages don't, in my experience, have problems quite this bad when they're forced to scale.
My goal isn't to cast blame, but to point out that CPAN is incredibly bloody far from a high-quality, stable, or usable code repository for certain very common use cases.
I read your post carefully, and I even agree with parts of it. There are major modules/module families that don't work together.
However, that's light-years from the claim that I quoted.
There are a lot of different ways of doing the same things in Perl the language and in the CPAN ecosystem. That's a strength and weakness. But in my experience, the authors of most of the modules care very deeply about doing things in a sustainable way.
I agree there is a lot of dross on CPAN. I've also lived the frustration of seeing two kinds of exception handler TryCatch vs Try::Tiny in the same subdir of a codebase. The issue is really that a lot of basic modern functionality requires CPAN, and the core of Perl 5 is small and mostly not super helpful. Something akin to Moose in core as the new standard way to do OO would have been a good plan 10 years ago.
I wasn't talking about the size of cpan because it's not relevant to my point. I was talking about Perl not being at the forefront of everyone's minds and being used as a 1st-class environment as computing entered new domains. E.g. instead of Sun or Microsoft taking an existing language like Perl and giving it a canonical IDE to let programmers write data entry GUI applications, they create Java & C# instead. When Google/Android decided on a development language for their smartphone SDK, they chose Java instead of Perl. It doesn't matter if cpan has mobile phone libraries now.
You seem to be taking my observations about Perl as some sort of veiled attack. I'm just reporting why and how Perl got to the state of being "disliked" today in programmer surveys. It's not about the "undecidability".
Ok then your definition is corporate ecosystem then? Perl in general is hardly the stuff of scaled soft eng. in a mega corp. It wasn't designed for that, but to empower an individual to be highly productive quickly. With that in mind the ecosystem is super healthy, even by your definition. I'm more shocked Python has managed to bridge that gap, but so did Pascal at one point so I guess designed to be a teaching language wins out!
>I'm more shocked Python has managed to bridge that gap,
That's more to my point. Old languages like C++ and Python keep getting rejuvenated as 1st class drivers of innovation but Perl (the language -- not the cpan) keep getting ignored.
I was surprised when Google chose Python as one of the 1st class languages for its new Tensorflow instead of a new language like Julia. I do understand why they chose Python but nevertheless was surprised.
Same for C++. It gets rejuvenated in things like graphics programming (NVIDIA's CUDA SDK is C++ not Perl). And when Bitcoin showed up in 2009, it's canonical client was C++ not Perl. Also, updates to C++ via C++14 and C++17 were discussions that turned into reality whereas Perl 6's long development became a running joke about vaporware.
Perl5 and Perl6 don't really have any new stories like that where it gets rejuvenated. Therefore, it keeps dropping off everyone's radar as "legacy".
Whether Perl programmers are highly productive with Perl isn't really the issue.
> Same for C++. It gets rejuvenated in things like graphics programming (NVIDIA's CUDA SDK is C++ not Perl). And when Bitcoin showed up in 2009, it's canonical client was C++ not Perl.
Perl is not competing with C++; they're entirely different languages with entirely different usecases. Comparing it to Python is reasonable; comparing it to C++ is silly.
> Also, updates to C++ via C++14 and C++17 were discussions that turned into reality whereas Perl 6's long development became a running joke about vaporware.
Newer C++ versions are more akin to newer Perl 5 versions like 5.26 (May 2017), 5.24 (May 2016) etc. Perl 6 is a new language using some of the same ideas; comparing Perl 5 and Perl 6 is like comparing C++ and C#, not C++ and C++17.
>Perl is not competing with C++; they're entirely different languages with entirely different usecases.
Yes, I understand that C++ does not compete with Perl. My point is the rejuvenation stories, not the runtime or use case differences.
I use a utility every day called ExifTool[1] that's 100% Perl source code or very close to it. However, ExifTool does not keep Perl at the top of mind the way Tensorflow brings Python relevancy to a new generation of programmers.
> Yes, I understand that C++ does not compete with Perl. My point is the rejuvenation stories
Well, the way C++ had new versions released in 2017 and 2014, Perl 5 had new versions released in 2017 and 2016; what stagnation are you demonstrating? You said "updates to C++ via C++14 and C++17 were discussions that turned into reality"; and the same thing happened with updates to Perl 5 (which is the language "Perl" is usually shorthand for). Perl 6 is an entirely different language, it, along with languages like Ruby, compares to Perl 5 the same way C# and Rust compare to C++.
My point was that the fact that C++ (like Perl) has had multiple updates in the past few years, and that Nvidia chose C++ instead of Perl as the primary language for an API are not evidence of Perl's decline. Perl 5 receives more frequent updates than C++, and C++ is being used where it makes sense and where Perl wouldn't have been used even when it was the new hotness. How is that evidence that Perl has fallen off?
I'm not saying that Perl's popularity hasn't greatly declined, I'm just saying that the evidence you're offering for it isn't evidence.
But it's not just quantity of updates. It's perception of the updates and what new things they bring to the table. Surely you're aware that many Perl programmers abandoned the language in between Perl 5 and Perl 6 because they felt it was getting neglected. (There's also a long post from a ~20 year Perl veteran (forgot his name) of one of the famous libraries on HN explaining his reasons for leaving Perl before Perl 6 but I can't find it at the moment.) How do we reconcile why they thought Perl was stagnating even though it was getting frequent updates?
This was the opposite perception of C++11, C++14, C++17 where many programmers were complaining that it was getting too many features and getting too complicated.
>Perl wouldn't have been used even when it was the new hotness.[...], I'm just saying that the evidence you're offering for it isn't evidence.
Ok, I shouldn't have derailed the discussion by giving the impression that NVIDIA SDK could have been Perl. The main idea is that old languages other than Perl are getting in the news for new domains.
Let me be more generic: There is no new rejuvenation stories where <any_domain_where_Perl's_runtime_model_and_scripting_semantics_is_appropriate> was chosen by a new computing domain help keep it relevant and keep it from being "disliked" by programmers. Is that wording more acceptable and suitable evidence of Perl's decline?
I'd also still like to get your opinion of why Perl has declined in mindshare and is one of the most disliked languages in programmer's survey.
