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Postings from June 2006
On 6/20/06, Chip Salzenberg <chip@pobox.com> wrote: > 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. Well said. > 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. Also moving more commonly used modules into core perl, making the core perl experience more usable would improve the lot of many, many, many a perl developer who is limited by policy that they cannot form dependencies on modules that arent in core. A group that I think is much larger and IMO much more important than the "minimal core" types realize. Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"