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Postings from December 2009
jesse wrote: > > > On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 11:47:45PM +0100, demerphq wrote: >> 2009/12/9 Nicholas Clark <nick@ccl4.org>: >>> On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 05:21:54PM -0500, jesse wrote: >>> >>>> Talking to Nicholas about my concerns, he suggested that many of these >>>> problems would go away if legacy directives always defaulted to enabled. >>> With a slightly more "exciting" view, that I don't know Jesse's opinion on, >>> that the intent is that specific legacy behaviours will change, by in the >>> next major release warning, and the one after that not being the default. >>> >>> Although thinking more about that, it means that "legacy" would be slightly >>> hairy, in that the default enabled subset would be different on different >>> (future) major releases. I don't know if that's too hard to explain and teach. >> I am firmly convinced the only sane solution is modifiers. > > I very much liked your modifier plan when you described it to me. I _can_ > see a desire to update Perl's default semantics for this or some other > core feature. There are certainly historical decisions that I'd love to > see rectified, as they are clearly bugs. What I worry about at night[1] > is breaking bugward-compatibility. I don't want 20% of CPAN breaking > needlessly on my watch. If we're going to "fix" default semantics, it is > imperative that users need to declare a desire for the new behavior. > > -Jesse > > > [1] Terrifyingly, the dream I remember having as I woke up this morning > was about release engineering 5.12.0. Really.[2] > > [2] Does this job come with health insurance? Does that insurance > include coverage for psychological care or psychoactive medication? > Well clearly there is some controversy now that I had not anticipated. I can empathize, Jesse. I have been a project manager for a few projects. Even when I was working with a bunch of programmers who were getting paid a lot of money to do the "right thing", and I knew them and their work pretty well, it was nerve wracking, especially as the release date crept, nay galloped, up. I can only imagine how much worse it is when you don't really know these volunteer participants. I've come out of retirement to work on this glaring hole in Perl wrt Unicode. It was bigger than I imagined. And I would like to see it fixed, yesterday. Also, anecdotally, I ran into a friend, actually an ex-coworker of mine, who is a linguist, and when I told him what I was doing, he got excited. He'd tried before, and given up working with Perl on Unicode. So now he wants me to tell him as soon as this is available. That said, it is more important to not destabilize existing code. I don't know what the right thing is for 5.12.Thread Previous | Thread Next