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Postings from July 2011
Morning,
I'll preface this by saying: This email is written because i am facing a lack of information and am feeling upset about it. If i missed something really obvious, please do tell me i am an idiot.
That said, i am here to lament a lack of information i am facing.
Recently there was YAPC::NA. At that event things were talked about and announced, things about perl core development. I've been reading vague mentions, allusions, rumors. Apparently Jesse Vincent announced something.
"Fortunately, Jesse Vincent's plans for 5.16 and beyond represent
the kind of change of narrative Perl 5 needs, regardless of what
happens with Perl 6."
From twitter, mostly, i pieced together that apparently he intends to change how `use 5.xxx` works? In order to make it apply some sort of fixed list of things, instead of the accumulation of everything that came before? I'm not entirely sure. Details are thin on the ground and hard to find.
So, an aquaintance of mine wrote this blog post recently, borne out of frustration about Perl: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2011/07/22/perls-of-wisdom/
I disagree with him on many things, but i also agree on many things. Most importantly though, he asked this:
"Do the core Perl maintainers care?"
And as much as i want to say "That question is dumb, of course they care, they're working on things!", i have to say: Thanks to a seemingly complete and utter communication failure of the Perl community at large the question seems to be entirely valid to ask. There's no way he could have feasibly known this.
I spend almost all of my free time with Perl. I release things to CPAN, i weigh in here when i think i can provide something valuable, i provide patches, badger authors into release, contributed to EUMM and many more. I follow over 100 perl people on twitter, spread interesting perl links on reddit and hackernews and make a lot of effort to keep up with what's going on.
But yet i find myself unable to find any information about the things the core people are planning. Not for lack of looking. I did. The only reason i know they actually did talk about something was twitter. Yet i did not see any blog posts, announcements, press releases, recordings or even just talk notes released. Of YAPC::NA i've seen a grand total of 3 packs of slides released.
I have to honestly say that right now i feel the perl core is telling me:
"Spend the cash, travel 6000 miles or fuck off."
To which i have to say: I'd love to. I just moved to another city, took up a new job and did talk to my new boss about whether he'd support it, but he did not want to that early in the work relationship. So, i'm effectively too poor to be allowed to know what the perl core is planning.
So, yes, it is entirely understandable for people who don't spend their entire life on Perl to think Perl is dead. From the outside the perl core looks like it is just coasting along and planning nothing.
Is this how things are wanted?
--
With regards,
Christian Walde
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