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Re: Perl 5.10.1
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From:
Ovid
Date:
June 24, 2009 01:09
Subject:
Re: Perl 5.10.1
Message ID:
934676.71589.qm@web65707.mail.ac4.yahoo.com
----- Original Message ----
> From: chromatic <chromatic@wgz.org>
>
> > So in my opinion, we need a way for people to publicize useful
> > branches they maintain and we need an easy way for an admin of average
> > skill to easily build and install a perl from an arbitrary git branch.
>
> That sounds like an affordance for an admin of average skill (is that code for
> "doesn't follow p5p closely"?) to believe that a big wad of code vetted for
> stability, utility, and correctness even less often than bleadperl has the
> patina of support, or at least official tolerence.
How many different forks of Ruby are out there (I think it's five with only two being active)? How many different forks of Python are out there (no idea)? They exist and people use them because they scratch their itches. Frankly, I'm sympathetic to both the position of yourself and Rafael and would love to see one path of Perl (Schwern's?) which tries to pull Perl out of its antiquated mess and another path of Perl which is safe for the cautious programmers. Because Schwern's fork (or someone else's) would be a *fork*, people will know this and can see how it impacts what they do. If the admin of average skill doesn't realize what this means, then they're not of average skill. They're a liability and should be treated accordingly.
I want to encourage people to experiment. Perl really, really needs some help and barring Perl 6 being released and adopted tomorrow, Perl 5 is the pony to bet on right now. Rafael holds the keys to the main branch of Perl right now and he's taking a conservative approach, as is his right. Thus, I don't see anything changing there. We need a good, stable fork where we can try to make Perl a modern language. Maybe's it's Schwern's fork. Maybe it's Kurila (I honestly don't know as I haven't paid enough attention).
I don't know what the right answer is, but something's got to budge because when you tell people "we have modern OO, just download this module", people laugh. I don't blame them.
Cheers,
Ovid
--
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