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Postings from June 2006
chromatic wrote: > On Monday 19 June 2006 18:36, Chip Salzenberg wrote: > >> 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. > > Did you both *find* and *ask* a user? 'cuz said user isn't me, Chip, Abigail, > Yves, or pretty much anyone reading or responding to this thread. > > I can't believe a user cares about a specific Perl version, modulo bug fixes, > when there's a working and vibrant and continually improving extension and > extension installation system, especially now due to the underappreciated > work of, say, Adam Kennedy as one example. *blush* Frankly, by the time I arrived at Perl, it was pretty much already stable. I wasn't here when Perl was anything (with the exception of now being unicode friendly) less than it currently is. Personally (and I by no means consider myself a "user" in the above sense) I couldn't care less about new language features. I almost wish the language would just stand still MORE than it does, and stop making me do more work to catch up. The users, to take last night's Sydney.pm user group meeting, don't care either. Not once was language features discussed. Most of last night's discussion was about how annoying it is that so little of CPAN works on Windows, and a discussions about the problems of dependency bloat in general. I'm all for the most recent work Nicholas++ has been doing to more Perl transportable. I'm all for tinkering with things around the edges (the dor operator and the our keyword). Proper unicode support is wonderful. But from my small samples users couldn't care less about new syntactic features or very little else that comes in the actual Perl tarball. They care about CPAN goodies. They care about things not breaking. And they care about getting actual work done. They don't care about C< use feature ... > Adam K p.s. Damn it, and just when I thought this thread was dying I've probably gone and stirred it up again.