Perl 6 is coming soon

After a long wait, the next version of the Perl  programming language will undergo a few betas, followed by a general release this year

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Perl 6, a long-awaited upgrade to the well-known scripting language, has gone into beta, with the general release planned for Christmastime.

The upgrade went to beta late last month, Perl designer Larry Wall told InfoWorld on Wednesday, and the October monthly release will feature the first of two beta releases of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. There been having monthly compiler releases for years, but the language definition has now stabilized. Wall added, “At this point we're optimizing, fixing bugs, and documenting, and I feel comfortable saying we can take a snapshot of whatever we have in December and call it the first production release.”
Highlights of Perl 6 include object-oriented programming with generics, roles, parallelism, concurrency, multicore support, and optional and gradual typing. Also slated for the release are definable grammars for pattern-matching and generalized string processing. “Many new features greatly advance our tradition of expressive and feature-rich programming,” the Perl 6 website states. Wall has cited other improvements, including “world-class” Unicode support and generational garbage collection.

In recent years, Perl has not had as high a profile of other scripting languages such as PHP or JavaScript. But it still is ranked ninth in this month’s Tiobe index of language popularity, which measures languages based on inquiries in search engines. It was ranked ninth this time last year as well. It is ranked 15th in this month’s PyPL index, which gauges language popularity based on searches on language tutorials in Google.

Then there's the elusive release of Perl 6. Perl 5 was released in 1994, and in the past 16 years, the language has not had a stable full point release. Make no mistake, there's a vast amount of improvements in Perl 5.10 versus Perl 5.0, but there hasn't been much evolution beyond Perl 5 concepts. And it seems there won't be: Perl 6 isn't an upgrade from Perl 5 -- it's basically a different language. That new language hasn't had a stable compiler release yet, though the project has promised "a useable release of Rakudo Perl 6" on July 29.

This follows a decade of development, as Perl 6 was originally announced way back in July 2000. There has never been a road map or timeline for Perl 6's release, and given the stability and ubiquitous use of Perl 5, there wasn't a rush to release a new programming language based on Perl 5.


The new concepts, syntax additions, and myriad changes in Perl 6 may create a barrier to widespread adoption, especially with the vast amount of existing Perl 5 code out in the world right now. Where Perl 5 usage originally spread like wildfire, Perl 6 may not be nearly as well used, if for no other reason than Perl 5 is "good enough" and the intervening 16 years of Perl 5 code is baked into so many brains.

There are plenty of good reasons to use Perl 6, generally from a syntactic point of view. I'm a fan of the coherent sigil structures, where variable calls are constant no matter what the scope. Plus, object-oriented programming in Perl 6 is simpler and more robust (though much of that can be had in Perl 5 with Moose), and the concepts of roles and macros are definitely handy.


 

 

 

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