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Postings from June 2006
On 6/16/06, Juerd <juerd@convolution.nl> wrote: > demerphq skribis 2006-06-16 11:05 (+0200): > > Lately I've been seeing comments in various forums along the following > > lines: > > 1. Perl 5 is a dead language > > 2. Perl 5 is going to be replaced by Perl 6 so there is no point in > > using Perl 5. > > The weird thing is, though, that this is expressed mostly by people who > don't know much about Perl 6, or Perl 5 for that matter. > > > I think these are a serious problem for the language and the > > community. When college teachers are saying that teaching PHP makes > > more sense because Perl is a dead language there is a problem. When > > the people who should know better think that Perl 5 is end-of-lifed > > because of Perl 6 then there is a problem. When the internal politics > > of the Perl community lead to more Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt than a > > focused Microsoft attack campaign there is something wrong. > > Agreed, but do you have suggestions? Advertising, advertising, and more advertising. :-) > > We need to make it clear that Perl 5 is not dead, not sleeping, and > > not going anywhere. > > This is already done. In my Perl 6 talks, I like to stress that we don't > need Perl 6 right now: it makes our lives much more fun, but for now > Perl 5 serves us well. This is also why it's okay to have Perl 6 take a > few more years. I'm not the only one who says this. Audrey also > encourages people to continue using Perl 5, and this is the general > concensus at Amsterdam.pm and the Perl Workshops I've been to. So we need to hammer on this point in the general public as much as we can. But im really glad to hear that a group like Amsertdam.pm sees things the same way, you lot are an influential group of people so im glad we are more or less on the same page. > So the people who have this wrong impression of Perl 5 are, as far as I > can tell, mostly outside "the community". That makes it very hard to > reach them. I have no idea how this could be done effectively... I have some ideas. We need people like Chromatic from O'Reilly publishing it as much as possible. We need people to write papers and press releases about what our plan is. We need to publish milestones and future plans that clearly indicate that the EOL of Perl5 is a long long way off. We need to enhance the visibility of Perl in the corporate sphere. We need to find useful features that the market wants and start delivering them. We need to make it clear that if people want to contribute to a project that Perl 5 is a worthy project to contribute to. I think we should also identify a plan for Perl 5, a long term plan that doesnt necessarily involve being compliant with Perl 6 design decisions. Cheers, Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"