What Happened to Perl 7?
I’ve written a nontrivial anount of Perl code in my life, admittedly almost none in the last decade. For all its obvious flaws, I always liked the language, and am happy to see it getting attention and moving forward.<p>Having said that, I think this might be too fine-grained.<p>First, opting in to an experimental feature could be a one-liner, “use experimental feature ‘try’” or similar. There’s no point in punishing your valuable beta testers beyond that with a second line that’s entirely redundant with the first one.<p>The larger problem is the versions. This basically requires someone to update their script headers all the time if they want to keep getting new features. Probably not much of a problem currently, but might be if releases get more frequent. I personally like the “edition” concept of Rust a lot better: get over with all necessary breaking changes in one swoop, but then begin a new (hopefully long) era of backwards compatibility. That makes it easier for users to maintain their code, is probably easier to implement, and also easier for users to learn, since there are fewer sets of rules.<p>Lastly, I hope they also focus on tooling around installation. One paradoxical problem with modernizing Perl is its historic success: every variant of Linux or Unix already comes with an ancient version of it. I know many experienced Unix people hate this trend, but there’s a reason some of the most actively evolving language ecosystems install more and more of their binaries into the user’s home directory. Maybe that’s already the case for Perl, I wouldn’t know.<p>All that said, I’m not following Perl that closely anymore. These are just some really quick observations about very complex topics. I don’t claim to know nearly as much as the people who made these decisions, and it’s great to see that things are happening.