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This is just bad maintenance. Just pick all the stuff people are complaining about and fix it!

1. Improve threads

2. Improve C API support

3. Give local::lib, cpanm by default ... multiple perl versions by default

4. Give direct support for coroutines / async await

5. Mark experimental features as non-experimental (attributes, signatures)

6. Pick an OO system, package system

7. Make switch cool again

8. Get more core modules or remove some. Give more visibility to cool perl modules. like PDL or something.

9. Improve GUI toolkit, Web Deployment and Web Assembly support

10. Improve look and feel of community sites

Heck break some backwards compatibility with Perl4, get rid of format.



Just a little note, Perl 5 actually has (in my opinion) excellent coroutines in the form of the "Coro" module hierarchy. Good enough to run a web service on.


it's likely a lot easier to do all that in the perl7 branch, so that backwards-incompatible changes can be made if needed.


It's not my understanding that the "Perl 7" idea suddenly gives license to be backwards incompatible. Instead, features that have been made available and gated in previous releases can be made default in a new major version.


yes, that's how they are starting off perl7, but the mere fact that it is given a different major version number gives them the social license to break stuff.


>get rid of format.

You shut your mouth. I can't even count th number of my scripts that'd break. I like format for output.


One more: add a proper exception handling setup.


Yeah that too! People keep saying perl is a bad language or something and the other languages can't even get implementing closures right.

I've always liked the references syntax, probably the most complained about feature. Its just pointer thinking. You could probably collapse `$array[$x]->{"foo"}->[0]` to `$array[$x]{"foo"}[0]` and save some keystrokes.


> probably collapse $array[$x]->{foo}->[0] to $array[$x]{foo}[0] ...

Yup, one's been able to collapse exactly like that for more than twenty years.

https://metacpan.org/source/LWALL/perl5.002b3/pod/perlref.po...

That's from 5.002, from last century, and it wasn't introduced on 5.002.

Beginning from v5.20, one's also been able to use the postfix dereference syntax, turning:

say join "\t", @{ $foo->{bar}[0]{quux} }

into:

say join "\t", $foo->{bar}[0]{quux}->@*;

Whether that's better or worse, it's debatable.


You're right! I always preferred the explicit arrow because it reminded me of C. Dammit now I want to write perl. I miss autovivification so much. Most people hate the pointer syntax and call it unreadable. I think there should be a perl tricks page that lists all these tricks.


This is planned.




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