A cri de couer for Perl

As seen here. I enjoy developing code in Perl. I know, I know, its “the write only language” and “looks like line noise”. It has endured some rather nasty FUD in its day, and yet, it keeps on growing in use. It is just an incredibly powerful, quite expressive language. One which enables you to write very terse code if you wish. But the presentation isn’t concerned with terseness, but with development into a modern programming language. Perl has some very nice capabilities, and there is more than one way to do it, which is one of its mantra’s. This mantra leads to multiple incompatible bolt on object systems, exception and testing code, etc. Some parts escape the particular nastiness associated with 25 years of backwards compatibility, some do not. I am a fan of threaded languages, I tend to like to create parallel tasks to hide latency. Perl with the threads::shared module lets me do this. As long as I don’t look under the covers, I can pretend they are threads and not processes. Which doesn’t bug me so much, but it has implications with respect to signal handling. I know the language needs to evolve. It is. But my needs are evolving somewhat faster than it. I am not thinking of replacements just yet. More along the lines of things to evolve to. I was hoping Perl 6 would be finished soon. The joke is it will be done in November. The funny part is when you ask of what year. Hopefully enough people in the Perl community will listen to the comments and think on them. Everything I am doing in Mojolicious right now, I can do in Node with HAPI or SAILS. I am not trying to follow fads. Looking at the long term though, and thinking about code that needs to work for a while without much change. I can do it in Perl, or others. Will stay away from the language-du-jour though.