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Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
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From:
Sawyer X
Date:
September 7, 2014 07:43
Subject:
Re: Roadmap/plan for Perl 5?
Message ID:
CAMvkq_SrzG0PFzHaQdEQR3G3UPuHtacaMvKTHzE6YG_jZQJfQw@mail.gmail.com
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?
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.
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