Journal TTK Ciar's Journal: Fretting About Perl 1
I've started three journal entries in the past couple of months, and failed to finish any of them. I'm a big loser. So here's a short and boring one, just to get something up here.
Fretting About Perl
I find myself writing more and more applications in perl, and less in C. Lately I've been feeling a little worried about the potential for losing all this work, if the language or modules evolve or disappear.
I've had a long history of investing a lot of time and energy writing libraries and applications in languages which turned out to be dead-enders: BASIC, Z80 assembly, real-mode x86 assembly, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, Modula-3, and SALT. Each of these held my attention and energies for years, before becoming untenable.
I have high confidence that C will stand the test of time, and that anything I write which complies with ANSI and POSIX standards will work on future platforms, but the ease and power of the scripting languages are hard to resist.
What of perl? How long is it for this world? It appears that perl6 will break compatibility with just about every nontrivial perl5 application. I can keep a perl5 interpreter installed, but how long will the codebase remain viable on the platforms of the future? And what of the perl modules? Will they continue to be supported, or will I find that they cannot be compiled on Linux 2.8.x or FreeBSD 7.x?
Am I painting myself into a corner YET AGAIN?
-- TTK
Perl (Score:1)
Really messed up that i'm just learning Perl.
How different is Perl6 from Perl5? Or should i be poking at that on my own?