Perl 7: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl… But It Is

Perl 7 cometh

When the Perl 5 community forced Perl 6 to change its name, I held out a modicum of hope that this would turn out to be for the best. Perl 5 could turn things around. They could use this as an opportunity to release a Perl 7 that took the best of Perl 6 that it could without engaging in another 10-year development hell and release a modern langauge to rival the likes of Python 3 and newer entrants.

But … no. It’s basically Perl 5, but with some startup pragmas turned on. That’s it. Yes, it supports Perl 5’s kind of hackish, half-way function signatures so you can (optionally, still) use formal parameter passing. Yes, it turns off support for one old crufty bit of syntax.

But it’s still Perl 5 more or less.

Perl 8?

So, the plan is that Perl 7 is not a destination, but a starting point. The plan currently involves a series of semi-experimental steps forward and then a Perl 8 that’s the “real future”. Do I believe this? No.

Why? Because in the past amost 30 years, Perl 5 hasn’t managed to do that, even though it has tried several times. Perl 5 is a language, but it’s also a culture, and that culture is founded on the notion that everything is more or less valid. So when considering what to jetison to move forward, the answer has always been, “well, maybe something, but not anything good!” Of course “good” turns out to be just about everything from someone’s perspective.

Python’s object lesson

In the before time, Python 3 was mocked by the Perl community for being not ambitious enough, and yet somehow too much of a step forward, losing the trust of its users by making changes like forcing a clumsy Unicode implementation on everyone.

But Python learned from the mistakes it made, and hadn’t bitten off so much in the transition that it lost its way. It turns out, in retrospect to have been a poorly managed, but highly valuable exercise in shaking up the language. Many old users wandered away, but hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new ones embraced it. Python, today, is shockingly easier to use than Perl, even providing tools for many of the features that Perl long held as its advantages (such as interpolating variables into strings).

Meanwhile, Perl 7 still has not turned on Unicode I/O by default.

Is Perl finally dead?

It might be. Or it could be that the Perl 7 gambit succeeds and draws in a new crop of developers who want to work on and improve the language. I’m hoping for, but not betting my career on the latter.