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Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
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From:
demerphq
Date:
September 3, 2014 08:08
Subject:
Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
Message ID:
CANgJU+V4eWy3UrVhB8055STTiN68Hxdi8nwLZFJx-ZG8twiJog@mail.gmail.com
On 3 September 2014 03:22, Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org> wrote:
>
> I'm just going to blat out a response to all the messages I've read so far,
> rather than carefully quoting and composing anything. If I have missed
> some
> specific point somebody wants addressed, please say so.
>
> perl5 does not have a road map. While I'm holding the pumpkin, I think it
> is
> *extremely* unlikely that it will. This is not to say that I think all the
> "we should"s in this thread are things we shouldn't.
>
> First, let me say what I mean by "roadmap," so it's clear what I'm saying
> we
> won't have. A roadmap lists the places that you are going to go, in the
> order
> you are going to go to them, and how you plan to get there. In software,
> of
> course, we're not traveling. Instead, the destinations are changes in
> behavior
> or implementation.
>
> I have worked on plenty of software that has a roadmap. They can be very
> nice
> to have, for a lot of reasons. Something you need for a roadmap to be
> useful,
> though, is a driver. Right now, nobody is driving perl5.
>
> What does that mean? Well, if you have a roadmap, and you're driving, you
> keep
> making sure that you're going the right way. If someone tries to get you
> off
> track, you decline. *If nobody else is making the car move, you keep your
> foot
> on the gas.*
>
> In other words, a software project roadmap is useful when the same person
> or
> group is in charge of determining the road map and affecting progress
> along the
> road. We don't have that.
>
>
There is the real danger of this turning into a chicken-and-egg debate. Do
we not have a driver because we dont want to have a roadmap, or do we not
have a roadmap because we don't have a driver?
> Instead, we have a flock of programmers, each with their own set of
> priorities
> and interests, each trying to pull the coconut in their own favored
> direction.
> I propose that a roadmap would not help in this situation, and that
> publishing
> one would be, at best, disingenuous.
>
>
While I agree that "roadmap" is too detailed for my thinking, I think we do
ourselves a disservice by not having a vision of where we want to go. I
believe that there are at least some devs who have skills that might do
stuff, /if they knew what to do/. But absent a personal itch to scratch,
and no vision for the future, such a dev has no insight on what they might
contribute, and if they could. Perusing a TODO list, with no vision to tie
it together, does not quite suffice IMO.
I am pretty certain if you got a group of proven core contributors
together, that they would coalesce around a common set of objectives that
could form a vision for the future. I would guess that "faster" would be on
the menu, and I bet "real OO primitives" would be there too, maybe "Better
IO model" as well.
Yves
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