Due to different requirements. Perl for production needs to support what was done 10 years ago. Perl for education should enforce current best practices, hence can be more aggressive.
> Strict, warnings, utf8 and newest Perl features on by default
>> Modern::Perl or a similar pragma.
I agree.
> Sub signatures and postfix dereferencing should be on and without experimental warnings
>> Easily achievable with a pragma.
True, as some of the other things, but not all.
> Most of the greatest CPAN modules should come preinstalled, and I am really talking about modules that helps beginners! i.e. Devel::REPL, Devel::DidYouMean, Moo, and many many other like Mojolicious, Dancer, Catalyst, whatever…
>> Task::Kensho, dwimperl, or a custom Task::.
While both Task::Kensho and dwimperl are awesome, they do not achieve what I would like to see in Perl for education. Furthermore, they are NOT backed-up by Perl foundation..
> Forbid/remove special cases like split emulating awk.. or indirect object notation and many other silly leftovers
>> indirect.pm for indirect object notation.
Sure, again, via pragma you can disable indirect object notation and many others, but you can't forbid things like one/two argument open and etc. etc.
>> In any case, they do no harm — nobody forces the teachers to teach these features.
In my opinion it does harm. Pupils may solve an exercise in a way that an experienced Perl developer ( with 10 years of experience ) would struggle to understand without a compiler, and now we are talking about teachers who had no more then a month or two years of playing. Furthermore, I feel they are wasting their time by explaining "what modern perl is" with all the boilerplate..
>> This ePerl should just be a pragma and a Task::, probably in a single distro. Which would be easy to write. No need to break backwards compatibility or to use a sandbox.
Yes and No. Perl lost it's fight in education sector. It's a fact. Thanks to Gabor Szabo and many others, there are things like dwimperl, but as we see - it's not enough. First of all, such initiative to get back into education market should be backed up by Perl foundation, who therefore might find sponsor and do a proper research of why Perl is not there and what we can do to be there. I can only guess, that it is:
- backwards compatibility
- no proper interactive shell
- too much boilerplate
- undermarketing PDL and friends
- need of PBP v2
- sponsors
- visibility(?)
btw, pdl.perl.org is down at the moment.
]]>The major thing that's missing in Perl6 is ready-to-use frameworks like Dancer etc (but I assume some proto-versions of such frameworks are hiding on github somewhere..)
]]>Some other ideas I came across:
* pyconuk 2014 had 2 days education track
* Applications like Pyland would be great
* It might be great to adjust Perl for different levels, something like staging Perl, i.e. allow only if statements for 5th grade pupils, allow feature x for 6th grade pupils etc. etc. obviously that fits syllabus and government requirements.