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Postings from June 2006
On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 06:50:14PM -0700, 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. Indeed, but that only serves to make my point, albeit in a roundabout way, as an illustration of self-selection bias. Of *course* current Perl users (and especially those who participate in p5p) don't care about the slow pace of core development, because the ones who -do- care have wandered away, perhaps to Ruby or some other language; or, partly due to lack of buzz from friends, they never arrived. Your observation is like holding a vote as to whether Thursday night is a good time for meetings, on Thursday night. I didn't suggest "Perl 5 is dead" or even "dying"; I think that can't possibly happen for decades, even in a worst-case scenario. OTOH, "Perl 5 is perceived as stagnant by too many potential users, and the user base is no longer growing much, if at all" I suspect is already true to within epsilon. The earlier anecdote about publishers saying that the book market for Perl is played out is, IMO, a significant warning sign. Meanwhile, in CPAN the user community is quite remarkably active, which is wonderful of course. But without active user-visible feature deltas to the Perl core, the psychological momentum that draws people to the language is reduced, entirely because Random::Module doesn't get the press. More press on CPAN modules could be much of a cure, assuming I've got the right diagnosis. -- Chip Salzenberg <chip@pobox.com>