Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from June 2006
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 12:51:19AM +0200, Abigail wrote: > New features is what the world uses as a measurement to decide software > is dead, or being developed. And they look at what's being developed - > for J. Random Perl Programmer, all the features currently in blead are > just vaporware. You win the thread. Old software doesn't so much die as creak and grind slowly to a halt, and that's what's been happening to the users' view of Perl 5 for a while now. This is hardly a new observation -- Larry cited it in the "Perl 6" "announcement" -- but the consequences of its continuing and intensifying truth seem to have escaped discussion. If the opening act is bad enough, the audience will leave before the headliner takes the stage. And if Perl 5's apparent development rate -- the rate of feature set evolution -- continues to slow, Perl 5's user base will shrink severely. That's as close to death as an immensely popular system like Perl 5 will ever experience. What's up in the Pascal community these days? -- Chip Salzenberg <chip@pobox.com>