The UNIX wars are over, and Leopard won. – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog

The UNIX wars are over, and Leopard won. – O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog:

Well, you could argue that any one of the OS X ‘Big Cats’ was the winner, simply because Apple has made a user-friendly UNIX system that outperforms most, if not all, other operating systems. Leopard is now fully POSIX conforming making it more inter-operable with other POSIX systems.

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Sadly, Apple seems to have neglected perl. Though perl 5.8.8 is going to be included in Leopard, 5.10 is due out shortly. (It has been due out shortly for a long time now.) Also, Apple completely neglects mention of perl on their fancy 300 Leopard features page. There is one mention of perl in association with DTrace but otherwise Ruby and Python get all the attention. With so many perl developers carrying around Apple laptops and so much Apple or Mac specific software on CPAN you would expect more and better perl integration in Leopard, but you would disappointed like me.

The “problem” with Perl is that nothing sexy is going on right now. It, like PHP, is merely useful and stable. Parrot is the Next Big Thing, if and when it happens, but I think in retrospect the Perl community would have been better off calling it something other than Perl, and letting Perl 5 continue moving forward without Perl 6 hanging over it. It seems like the same kind of — stagnation? not sure that’s the best word — you’re seeing with PHP where there simply hasn’t been a big need seen to migrate off PHP 4.

I just did that on my hosted boxes, in fact, to allow myself to finish a project I was building using Mediawiki, which requires PHP5. there are enough compatibility issues that the ISP only upgrades on request, and does so by migrating you to a PHP5 environment. There’s no PHP4/PHP5 in parallel, which oculd make life interesting for some folks — but it’s the kind of thing that discourages folks from adopting the new release. The planned End of Life of PHP 4 will possibly “encourage” that a bit, but at the risk of pissing folks off.

I worry we’ll see the same kind of hesitation to move to Perl 6, when it’s finally done. For all the good it seems to have, it makes upgrade paths interesting and complex, and a bit tough in an in-place environment. And that it’s such a complete rewrite — while still being called Perl, it’s sort of put the hype machine into hibernation for the language until it’s done.

I don’t expect Perl will get much visibility until Parrot is out, because the perception seems to be Perl 5 is at a dead end. Not really true, IMHO, and it’s still a very popular and much-used technology. But it’s not the new puppy right now…

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