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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

One of my big takeaways from this article is Larry's view on the history of language. He was quite serious when he compared Ada to English, and I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form? Might it be a bigger language than English? Might the notion of a "small" programming language being the ideal be somewhat quaint when a CPU with 4GB of integrated memory dances on the head of a pin?

Anyway, what I'm getting that is 4 years is a pretty short amount of time now that Larry Wall has made me think about it.

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Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match.

Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time.

Compared to all languages in its class, Perl hasn't broken backwards compatibility since past 25 years. Python had to break it for some very simple syntax changes. Perl has never done it, not even once in past 25 years. That is quite a feat considering so much syntax has been added to the language since then. Perl 5 has also found a way to add more syntax without dealing with the core by modules like Devel::Declare.

So Perl evolution is set for many years. You will see it evolve grow. New neat ideas and many like Moose will find their way into Perl.

Basically what makes it special is its hackable, flexible and extensible. And such languages generally stay around for a long time.

Back-compat can have many meanings - but my understanding is that every major release does break some back-compat in some way - otherwise it would not be a major release. And if you think that binary compatibility is not be fair - then how about pseudo-hashes?

This is not to say that I don't agree that Perl has perhaps the best back-compat of all the languages that still evolve - but these absolute statements have this slightly sect feeling.

I think pseudo-hashes were always marked as experimental, up until they were removed.

That said, I'm pretty sure you're right that backwards Per 5 broke backwards compatibility with Perl 4 (and presumably 4 with 3, etc.)

From what I've read various places (but can't find a reference at the moment), the version bump from 3 to 4 was just to be able to have the Camel book coincide with a major version (i.e. "this book describes Perl 4" instead of "this book describes Perl 3.1.4.1.5" or whatever).

Reference: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

Heh, thanks! I read through the whole thing very carefully before posting, and couldn't find it. Now I see it's in the Introduction: "Perl 4 introduced the first Camel book. Really. We mostly just switched version numbers so the book could refer to 4.000."

I find it really interesting to think about Perl 100 years from now. Will it still be around in some form?

There is a really excellent SF novel 'A Deepness in the Sky' by Vernor Vinge.

It's a few thousand years from now, and one really important job is "Programmer-Archeologist". Their job is to grub around in libraries, find an already existing solution, adapt it to present needs. This is important because without quality automation running your spaceship, you could die.

There are hints that some of these libraries are really old: an off-hand comment is made referencing what must be unix epoch.

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