Perl is Dead! Long Live Perl!

This somewhat risible survey reveals that Perl has almost fallen out of the top 10 programming langauges in use. Given the many different ways that statistics can be mashed together and the loose method of collecting the numbers, I think it is unlikely that they can claim 3 decimal places of accuracy for any of this.

On the other hand, using activity as a barometer of interest in a langugae and perhaps what to brush up on to stay/get employed, take a look at stats on Ohloh. You can pick a basket of languages and compare check-ins and TLOC and decide that actionscript is not about to overtake C++ any time soon.

This page lets you look at a ramge of stats for a language off their long list while this will let you compare a wide range of languages with a pretty chart: take a look at this comparison showing that the volume of Python checkins is growing faster than Perl and Ruby together. Or maybe it is showing the rate of Python projects being added to Ohloh? Who can say?

If it looks like a Duck, it may be a Parrot..

Last Saturday (July 15), the DFW Pythoneers gathered together to hear wise words from Patrick Michaud. "Lo", he said, "it is not an ex-parrot (though it may be pining for the fjords.." and we listened in solemnity.

PM gave us another great talk and explained why Perl 6 is important/interesting/intriguing to Python people and how we can get pizza paid for by the Perl foundation while looking at Python.

Parrot is the VM for the upcoming Perl6. It also happens to be capable of 'running' Python (and a bunch of other languages, some of which you will wish you had never heard of if I told you about them so I won't. You're welcome) and Patrick gave us a run-down on how the Python sourcefile in all of its beauty gets transformed into bytecode for Parrot. It's less than simple so you can go ook it up yourself at parrotcode.org.

After the meeting, I checked out the latest Parrot code and tried the test suite. Yay, it worked (good start) and then I tried the command line prompt for the Python part of Parrot, pynie. It also worked but things got a little bumpy after that:

• longs appear to be broken but aren't
• floats are broken, along with imaginary numbers
• list, arrays and dictionaries are less than working

It's a work in progress and I am not sure how to fix the BNF grammar that's written in Perl6 Regex syntax so sent Patrick an email and called it a night.