Pinderkent

I saw an article today talking about a "new wave" of activity within the Perl community. Although things have been looking more positive for Perl, it's still far too early to suggest that there is a Perl resurgence in progress.

The most significant progress the Perl community has made lately is that of actually getting some traction behind Parrot and Perl 6. For most of the past decade, we saw little to nothing substantial. There was a lot of talk, but little in the way of tangible software. What was available was not production-ready by any means, which of course is unsuitable for a pragmatic language like Perl.

Pugs, a Perl 6 implementation written in Haskell, was perhaps the most useful of what was produced during what we might come to refer to as the "Perl Dark Ages" of 2001 to 2008. During 2005, it saw relatively active development, and frequent releases. Unfortunately, it lost momentum during 2006, and since then has essentially stalled. A good indication of this is its very homepage, which at the time of this writing (February 18, 2009) still says "© Copyright 2005-2007, The Pugs Contributors."

The announcement last December suggesting that we'd actually see Parrot 1.0 during the first part of 2009 was a good first step. Indeed, it appears as though the March 2009 release of Parrot 1.0 is still on track. This upcoming release will no doubt be highly publicized online, and will likely raise significant awareness of Parrot and Perl 6. Although it isn't mature yet, this release will be an important milestone in lending some legitimacy to both the Parrot team and to the Perl 6 efforts so far.

A month after the aforementioned announcement regarding Parrot 1.0, we got word that the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6 was going to become more independent of the Parrot project. Over the past month, we have seen this happen to some extent.

Without a production-ready implementation of Perl 6, we can't yet say that there is a true resurgence or "new wave" within the Perl community yet. The recent activity surrounding Parrot and Rakudo has helped put the Perl community on the right track. But we likely won't see any true and widespread excitement arise until we have a decent Perl 6 implementation readily available. Only then can module authors start writing code that makes use of Perl 6's new features, which sets the stage for framework authors and application authors to start making use of Perl 6. At that point we'll need to see the Perl community produce something truly spectacular, much like Ruby on Rails was to the Ruby community several years back. Once that happens, we can consider the Perl community to have revitalized itself.