This is just an observation of mine that might give some a bit of food for thought. I'm not terribly interested in a long criticism and discussion thread since it's plainly and simply my opinion, whether like it or not. When merits of a proposed new feature are discussed on this list[1], some people appear to dismiss it with the argument: "This isn't worth it because it's not earth shattering enough to do grand conversions and it's just not going to show up on CPAN for the next five years because of backcompat considerations. Therefore, it is meaningless." This is not a valid argument. We are developing a programming language here, not some little CLI tool that only has immediate impact. The direction of development ought to primarily guided by where we want the language to go. Next on the list of considerations is constraint by practicalities. "Is this going to break all code out there subtly?" Whether or not the benefit is long- or short-term should not have any major influence on what's better for the *language*. A different and less friendly way to phrase how I feel is this: The people who criticise a change solely on the degree of *immediate* benefit are implicitly denying Perl a future and have no business on this list. --Steffen [1] "-> => ." being the mist recent example, but in none of this am I saying whether or not I like that particular feature. I'm actually somewhat on the fence. But there were similarly nonsensical arguments about function signatures.Thread Next