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Showing posts from July, 2009

Perl's popularity problem...

There has been a recent flurry of blogs on Perl's perceived popularity problem: Solutions Are Not Problems. Problems Are Problems , Ovid seems to be asking us to ignore the symptoms and work harder to identify the underlying causes Is the Perl Community Schizophrenic? , Phillip Smith argues that the Perl community needs a benevolent branding dictator Is it really hard to find good Perl programmers? , Gábor focuses in on the belief that Team leaders and managers think about Perl that it is dead, unmaintainable Perception is Reality , Gábor recommends getting professional help (PR/Marketing) What does the Outside of Perl look like? , Ovid on the negative perceptions of Perl I'm a little cynical. Many good insights and areas for improvement are identified. But Perl needs to gain mindshare. And the only way to do that is to deliver the goods: Perl needs best of breed and/or innovative killer apps... There is very little going on today which makes Perl relevant to anyone outside the

Legacy Traps

Here's an interesting dialogue from #perl6 yesterday: TimToady but the fact is, Perl 5 is basically in a no-win situation long term, which we first recognized in 2000 PerlJam TimToady: now you're alienating all the staunch perl 5 supporters :) TimToady I'm only alienating them "long term" KyleHa If loving Perl 5 is wrong, I don't want to be right. 8-) PerlJam Someone mentioned (probably on use.perl somewhere) that Nicholas tried regular release cycles a while back. I'd like to know if that's true and if so, what became of it. ruoso I don't really think the regular releases is the issue... TimToady I love Perl 5 too, but it's stuck (culturally, and maybe technically) in a legacy trap, and the Perl 6 approach is the only long-term way out of that. moritz_ ruoso: it's not about *regular*, but about being able to rele