"Art of Unix Programming" on perl

[Edward Peschko]

> Eric Raymond's book-in-development ``The Art of Unix Programming'' says
> this about the future of Perl:

>> Perl usage has grown respectably, but the language itself has been stagnant
>> for two years or more.

> Bah. Looks like my Perl5-Porters summaries have been completely in vain. :)

yeah, he's full of BS here..

> Perl's internals are notoriously grubby; it's been understood for years that
> the language's implementation needs to be rewritten from scratch, but an
> attempt in 1999 failed and another seems presently stalled.

> If that other is Perl 6, I don't think we're stalled, are we? Language design
> is waiting on Larry to produce the spec, and internals design is going on
> quietly but steadily. We're in the design stage. That'll probably last a while
> because scripting languages and interpreters aren't easy things to design, and
> are even harder to get right.

yeah well, sometimes I think that things *are* stalled. For example, I'm trying
to both update my last book (and perhaps write a new one) and its kind of 
difficult to start let alone convince an editor to put the effort in if you 
don't even have a spec to work from.

And lacking a spec, a status would be nice. Last time I heard, larry was going
to be working on 'chunks of RFCs at a time' and posting the results of those
for digestion. What happened to that? The last thing posted was Dec 20th on 
the subject. Is there a place for statuses that I'm unaware of?

Ed