from Hacker News

Perl 5.26.0 released

by abhinickz on 6/1/17, 6:23 AM with 157 comments

  • by tete on 6/1/17, 8:41 AM

    Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me.

    Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that:

    https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

  • by kluck on 6/1/17, 9:58 AM

    Reading through the changes it becomes abvious how rich a language Perl is. Just look at all the edge cases and fine tunings that this long time of development and improvement has generated. Its impressive. Anyone starting their own little programming language should really consider how big a task that actually is. This is not to stop anyone or discourage them.

  • by 0xFFC on 6/1/17, 9:40 AM

    Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ?

    P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

  • by HighPlainsDrftr on 6/2/17, 8:21 AM

    Perl is awesome. Its like writing a sentence or paragraph. I decide how I want to present each sentence or paragraph. Then I get to write it in Perl.

    Its a very easy language to learn. My first language was C back in 1994. I was in high school and encouraged to learn C before I learned Perl.

    I read my books. I kept on going after it. Then finally six years later I started learning Perl.

    Perl is a great language.

    I haven't touched Perl6 yet - I bet its even better. It might take me 20 years just to do a hello world in it and optimize it.

    Larry gave us a great place to start. Guido is awesome too.

    "I don't like big bloated snakes though" -- I heard this back in 1996 or so...

    We have been focusing on languages for 20k years or so. We have built computers for about 100 years - and invented languages to talk to them.

  • by edibleEnergy on 6/1/17, 3:04 PM

    I'm excited for the whitespace stripping heredoc operator, it's always a bummer having to put all heredocs all the way left.

  • by vgy7ujm on 6/1/17, 5:40 PM

    Great work! Excited about the direction Perl 5 is going!

  • by ibn-alfatal on 6/1/17, 10:01 AM

    Perl always reminds me of this guy :) https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2