Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from September 2014
Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
Thread Previous
|
Thread Next
From:
H.Merijn Brand
Date:
September 7, 2014 07:51
Subject:
Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
Message ID:
20140907095048.3e0a48b6@pc09.procura.nl
On Sun, 7 Sep 2014 09:43:23 +0200, Sawyer X <xsawyerx@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 3:50 AM, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) <
> philippe.bruhat@free.fr> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Sep 06, 2014 at 10:11:57PM +0200, Sawyer X wrote:
> > > On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:55 PM, Ricardo Signes <
> > perl.p5p@rjbs.manxome.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > It's important to have a plan and a vision before you break ground on
> > your
> > > > massive new skyscraper. After it's inhabited and in heavy use, it is
> > not
> > > > unreasonable for the vision to be "it remains standing and habitable,
> > with
> > > > improvements made when the possibility becomes apparent."
> > > >
> > >
> > > But Perl 5 isn't a skyscraper. There is no "we're done, we can go home
> > now"
> > > stage. If we're at the stage of "basically we're done, we just gotta make
> > > improvements when the possibility becomes apparent", it's more like just
> > > trying to keep the patient alive.
> >
> > In Ricardo's metaphor, Perl 5 is indeed not a skyscraper, it's a city.
> >
> > The skyscraper is a new feature. The "done" stage does exist for a
> > skyscr^Wfeature, where the proverbial attention ported to backwards
> > compatibility by the porters means that the focus shifts from "build it"
> > to "keep it standing".
> >
>
> All of these metaphors are beginning to confuse me. Considering I wasn't
> smart enough to begin with, I'll go back to the basics. :)
>
> My interest boils down to: do the Perl 5 Porters, as a group, have any
> intention of continually developing Perl 5 (the language and the
> interpreter), or is it simply a state of keeping it alive? Is Perl 5 still
> growing are is it at a development standstill?
My feel is that there are no "generic plans", but that the ideas that
come up on an ad-hoc basis keep motivating others to do yet more
interesting new things with the language as a whole.
This dynamic behavior is hard to describe, but is John Doe implements
something that makes him/her happy, it is very likely that Mary Doyle
will use this new feature to scratch his/her itch and thus the language
is enriched even more.
> If it's only at the state of "keep it standing", then subroutine signatures
> aren't necessary. A MOP isn't necessary. We don't need to improve the C API
> because it works, we don't need to overhaul the tests. Do we really need
> such superb Unicode support in the language itself, or can we simply make
> it available on CPAN? Recent emails from Karl Williamson discussing
> additional change suggestions to the regular expression engine (whether
> they materialize, get accepted, or change form) are really not necessary.
> Changing how pack() works is unnecessary. All of these things are actually
> hindering the ability to keep maintaining status quo.
>
> At first I asked "Is there a vision? Is there a roadmap? What are they?"
> but now I'm falling back to "Wait, is the continued development of Perl 5
> even an interest?"
>
> Unfortunately some of these metaphors and discussions lead me to believe
> that the answer - at least for some people - is no.
--
H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.19 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/
http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
Thread Previous
|
Thread Next