I think so. :(
Rarely, very rarely, since Perl6 was announced has there been any funding for Perl5 projects. P6 is the money pit into which most funding disappears into and has been so for quite some time. Some years ago I tried valiantly to get TPF to set up separate funds, at least one for p6 funding and possibly one for p5 funding, so that those who still wanted to fund p5 or who wanted to fund p6 exclusively could do so. That never happened. P5 isn't dead, it's just very, very stable.
Gnat was being honest and, really, if you ask any of the mature perl guys out there, every single one of them will admit to moving on and using other things these days. Perl is still good for lazy moments, specific time-honoured utility and nostalgia...but times change and people move on.
Re:You're about 6 years late :)
Alias on 2006-11-06T06:00:11
It's fortunate that he does at least recognise that people move on.
It's quite obvious at this point that for those people that are interested in the beauty of the language syntax itself, there's younger and sexier languages out there now.
Most of the Perl 5 people I see around are pragmatists who care mostly about solving problems effectively, rather than language geeks.Re:You're about 6 years late :)
rafael on 2006-11-06T08:48:56
Very stable? Well, no. The grants commitee contains many Perl 5 people, many Perl 5 projects have been founded (including Nicholas' work on the internals), and with the implementation of three new features in bleadperl this month (_ prototype, UNITCHECK blocks, qx// overriding), I really hope to see 5.10 out in a few months. There is not much work left on it.Re:You're about 6 years late :)
Alias on 2006-11-06T13:53:14
There's a few places in which I disagree with you.
5.10 blesses Module::Build as core, and in my opinion it's just not ready. There's still fairly significant problems still to be resolved. And this isn't just a small issue either, because all of CPAN sits on top of the toolchain modules.
There's a few other things like CPANPLUS that still need work too.Re:You're about 6 years late :)
TeeJay on 2006-11-06T09:32:00
You seem to be ignoring CPAN-space - i.e. much of Perl5 development is no longer in the core for the obvious reason that the API is stable, it works well and non-language geeks need libraries to solve their problems instead of new syntax or behaviour.
As it happens I'm still maintaining Maypole - it was funded by a TPF grant a couple of years ago, and it rejuvinated the Perl (and other language) Application Server space, and now we have Catalyst, Jifty and others, and these in turn have pushed the ORM space with DBIx-Class and Jifty ORM appearing.
A small grant for a simple MVC Framework may not look like much but it had an impact far larger than paying for some obscure internals to be fiddled with.
That's not to say good work isn't being done on the internals, but it's hard to notice, because -- well you shouldn't really notice internals tuning unless they're fixing a problem that affects you.Re:You're about 6 years late :)
Abigail on 2006-11-06T12:24:19
P5 isn't dead, it's just very, very stable.
Indeed. The first six years of Perl5, we got a new release about once a year. 5.6 was released in spring 2000. In summer, the perl6 movement started. Summer 2002, over four years ago, saw the last major release of perl5.
No wonder people move on.
Re:No no its not
bart on 2006-11-06T19:21:38
Yes yes your work on the regexp engine is very exciting. But people who are looking for something new (and, aren't we all?) aren't very excited with just a faster implementation — even if the speed doubles. They want new features. Like, a regex engine that can parse recursive patterns.
But, I thought I heard you were working on that too?Re:No no its not
Matts on 2006-11-06T21:38:02
Yes, that and more is coming in perl 5.10. Named matches, engine hints (to tell it to stop backtracking), recursive regexps, and more.
I'm damned excited by it all.Re:No no its not
hex on 2006-11-07T11:06:59
Hooray!
