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A comment on Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installation?. Parent comment

Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by thesuperbigfrog on Saturday May 30, 2020 @08:49AM (#23360797)
>> Python has a bigger ecosystem of libraries etc available.

CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/index.html) is quite large and has libraries to do almost everything you can imagine.

I am not sure if CPAN or pip has more libraries though.

>> And it's generally easier to read/write.

Python looks nicer, but not everyone likes significant whitespace.

The Python 2 to 3 change has also caused some adoption issues. The Perl 4 to 5 happened quite a while ago. Perl 5 has been integral to Unix-like systems since the web went mainstream.

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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by aryonoco on Saturday May 30, 2020 @08:58AM (#23360840)
Yeah and the Perl 5 to Perl 6 move... oh wait...
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by thesuperbigfrog on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:36AM (#23361090)
Exactly. Widely-used programming languages continue to be used even when the authors move to a new version.

Perl 5 lives on and is still developed and maintained: https://www.perl.org/get.html

Perl 6 became Raku: https://www.raku.org/

Python 2 is still in use, but officially deprecated: https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/

You could probably start a business maintaining a Python 2 distribution and selling support to businesses and organizations that rely on Python 2 and are not in a position to upgrade: https://www.activestate.com/blog/python-2-eol-report-card-is...

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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by jhoechtl on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:55AM (#23361209)
Uh, raku looks interesting, the web site is also quite accessible. Sad that it took so long, maybe Perl6 would have regained some territory otherwise.
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by lizmat on Sunday May 31, 2020 @08:37AM (#23369173)
Writing this while looking at CrewDragon docking at the ISS. Which took SpaceX 18 years, and many people thinking they would never make it. If anything, an inspiration to the people currently working on and using Raku!
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by tankenmate on Saturday May 30, 2020 @09:09AM (#23360910)
And Larry & Co realised that it was sufficient different that now it is no longer called Perl 6.
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by pram on Saturday May 30, 2020 @10:08AM (#23361273)
and yet kept the logo that literally has P6 embedded in it
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by mirchibajji on Saturday May 30, 2020 @10:49AM (#23361573)
Perl5 is not EOLed, so no one is forced to "move". I haven't heard of any real business actually moving from Perl5 -> Perl6 (Raku, to be precise) for support/legacy reasons.
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Re:Why does OpenBSD still include Perl in its base installat... by toast0 on Saturday May 30, 2020 @11:14AM (#23361725)
Perl 4 to 5 was before my time, but I read it wasn't really a major change, just to sell books. Perl 5.6 to 5.8 was the big moment where strings became (optionally) arrays of characters instead of arrays of bytes. This caused some amount of breakage, but was a long time ago now; anything else broken since then has been pretty minor.
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