ActiveState Perl

[Baz]

I haven't used Perl for a few years and recently tried loading it on a different computer (windows8). ActiveState have released a new feature 'State Tool' for adding modules to 'make it easier' than Cpan and PPM. After it failed and I did a bit of checking it seems it is aimed at creating 'Projects' in a virtual environment "after you have created an account". Is this a thin edge of the wedge of them monetising it by gaining control of your designs in virtual space? Like the moves of various CAD platforms.
Anyone done more with this?
Maybe time to move to Strawberry, or start again with Python.

[Bented]

I gave up on using Windows many years ago and migrated all native applications to big thought.

As you may imagine this approach has it's own perils, discounting awful puns.

On the bright side not one system has locked up/blue screened, restarted without a Yes, updated without asking politely, loaded a new version of JAVA, nor given me bill gates ex wife's phone number, but what do I expect from a mass market operating system.
A miracle ?

[thin-woodsman]

I have not used Perl or ActiveState in ... decade(s)?

My advice would be to switch to Python. I only use it at arm's length myself but it is what I recommend to the people taking over my projects.

As for Perl on Windows, there will likely be a reaction to ActiveState's move, but it will be like the open source movement on OS X - a lot of fragmentation and incompatibility, leading to confusion amongst the userbase if you are not shipping turnkey systems (is that even still a thing?). If this is for internal use, well, long-term maintainability is the issue, so all bets are off either way it sounds like.

Have not heard of strawberry, unless that is a joking reference to Ruby, which was pretty much Perl-made-useful ten years ago.

[J Tiers]

There are too damn many programming languages. That's been true ever since PL-1 came out.... had to learn that way back in school, running batch on the IBM 360. It was the first one that was "too many" as far as I am concerned.

[PStechPaul]

When I was experimenting with server side code, I tried Perl, but found I liked PHP much better. I installed Apache localhost on my Windows machine and used it to debug my scripts before unleashing them on the world "wild" web

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/platform/windows.html

I do have several PHP scripts on my shared web server, but I haven't done much with them for a number of years.

Here is a simple PHP test script:

http://www.pauleschoen.com/cgi-bin/PHPtest.php

[Baz]

Hum, this is just home use really. I hadn't realised Ruby had a Perl base but it is one of the obsolescent languages too. One of the reasons for it is the excellent home control program MrHouse but that has fallen out of favour with almost no active community compared to 20 years ago. I might try Home Assistant which is Python based. One negative is (from quick google) that Python is much slower than Perl.
Maybe start from scratch based on what Circia's Circuit Cellar did in Byte magazine in the '80's. Any one remember him?

[thin-woodsman]

I wouldn't worry about the speed difference. That gets trotted out every once in awhile to prove a point, but for all of the languages in common use the difference is negligible given the speed of modern processors. It used to be that GUI code was the big slowdown, and you couldn't run a GUI on anything but a compiled language. That has been fixed, with most languages using something like C or C++ for the GUI toolkit. Now the big slowdown is in the machine learning area, and even there you can choose between the code taking a day to write and twenty hours to in Python, or a week to write and nineteen hours to run in C or Java. All of which is to say that if the application currently runs fine in Perl, it likely will run fine in Python.

[nickel-city-fab]

I gave up on using Windows many years ago and migrated all native applications to big thought.

On the bright side not one system has locked up/blue screened, restarted without a Yes, updated without asking politely, loaded a new version of JAVA, nor given me bill gates ex wife's phone number, but what do I expect from a mass market operating system.
A miracle ?

I love this. I've been running FreeBSD (UNIX) on the desktop for years, after spending the previous decade or two running Linux. Back before anyone heard of it, and it all fit on a few floppies. I don't do much programming at all any more, no desire to, But I've always liked shell scripting. Guess I was never very "hard core" in that regard.