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Postings from February 2007
On 2/5/07, jesse <jesse@fsck.com> wrote: > Arguably, the best thing to happen to Perl 5 development in the past 10 > years was the Perl 6 effort drawing away all the attention and > excitement so that p5p could get real work done without questions about > deadlines, deliverables or whether the sky was falling. > > It would be wonderful to see Perl 5 return the favor. I think the issue that some people on Perl5 feel that Perl6 is holding Perl5 back. You can take the view that that is crazy talk, and ignore it, or you can assume that where there is smoke there is fire and try to think of a solution. Personally I think there is a problem and that the solution is really clear. Announce LOUDLY that Perl6 is not the futurue of Perl5, that it is a research project that hopes to make Perl5 obsolete, but until there is a consensus that it has achieved this goal /in the marketplace/* that Perl5 will continue on being developed without considering Perl6 as the future as long as there are developers (like me) that are willing to work on it. We've already see one contentious feature added to Perl5 purely because Perl6 mandated it, over the strenuous objection of a big chunk of the community. And its not uncommon to hear that objectives are not in scope on perl5 because they are part of Perl6. So basically if the Perl6 people want to get the Perl5 people "to return the favour" they should release Perl5 from its bonds to Perl6. Once Perl5ers no longer have to care about Perl6 then we will no longer care about Perl6, and when it truely makes Perl5 irrelevent presumably we will all happily start working on it instead. The projects are coupled, and the people from the Perl6 camp seem to happily ignore the Perl5 camp (even when IMO they shouldnt) but unfortuantely given the situation the perl5 camp CANT IGNORE the Perl6 camp. Until we can, expect more of these threads, here and elsewhere. Unless the community sorts itself out internally about this issue the long run will be that eventually Perl5 will get forked and the leading lights of the Perl6 community will be given no further say. And i think thats not a good thing for the community, but unless people in the Perl6 community start taking some of these issues seriously then I think that is what will happen. Cheers, Yves * The marketplace is the marketplace of open-source developers and consumers of the product. As long as there is a sizable segment of the former that feels Perl5 is not a waste of time and until Perl6 has proved itself to the consumers as being a better product than Perl5 then Perl5 will NOT BE replaced by Perl6. Whatever anybody on the Perl6 project says, even Larry. -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"Thread Previous | Thread Next