Stevan Little

Perl has been described in many ways; a Shinto Shrine, executable line noise, a Swiss Army Chainsaw, the Duct Tape of the Internet, etc. But I think Perl is more like a old pop star, always reinventing itself to stay relevant, never truly leaving our consciousness, always just a melody away. What is the state of Perl today? Will Perl 6 be the big comeback? Will 2017 be the year we make Perl great again?

A long time ago (2013), in a galaxy far, far away (Orlando Perl Workshop) I gave a talk in which I declared Perl was not dead, but a dead end. The thesis of the talk being that the Perl 5 core was not a platform capable of change and the Perl 6 future was still to uncertain, so ... the only reasonable thing was to just rewrite it all in Scala!

In the intervening years ... my rewrite stalled, I made peace with the Perl core, others attempted forks and rewrites (to varying degrees of success), and the Perl 6 Christmas finally came! In this talk we will reexamine the state of Perl in 2015 and discuss it's glorious future!

The Perl programming language is currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and for good reason! Perl 5 development continues to move forward with new features being introduced and many old ones improved, meanwhile the development of Perl 6 is making significant progress and has reached a major milestone, the details of which will be announced by Larry Wall at this very conference. For many years now the development of these sister languages have affected and influenced one another in a myriad of ways. Over the last few years I have been working on a design proposal for enhancing and extending the object system of Perl 5 which borrows a number of elements from the Perl 6 object system. In this talk we will explore the various evolutionary stages of that work, as well as discuss the complexities of adding new features to such a mature and well established language like Perl 5. Along the way we will also examine the various meanings of "legacy" in each context and show how it informed the design decisions that were made.