On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 07:06:46PM +0000, Simon Cozens wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
Well, sometimes I think things *are* stalled. I'm thinking of updating my book
to perl 6, and maybe writing a new one, except that it is very difficult
to start, let alone convince an editor to put the time and effort into such a
project if you can't even point to a spec.
And - correct me if I'm wrong - but there isn't even a status available on how
far the spec process is coming. I'm not saying that every day or even every
week - but once a month might be nice. Last time I heard, he was going through
'topic by topic' and was going to release verdicts bit-by-bit. But that was
on Dec. 20th.
Ed
