On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 03:01:47PM -0400, Stephen P. Potter wrote:
> It seems to me that recently (the last two years or so) and especially with
> 6, perl is no longer the SAs friend. It is no longer a fun litle language
> that can be easily used to hack out solutions to problems.
See, I have a basic problem with this. Whatever you were doing with
perl4 ten years ago, you can still do with perl 5.6.1 (mod a few minor
differences) by simply ignoring all the new features. Perl can be
taught/learned as a small, fun language (where 'fun' is a highly
relative term). In fact, there's an O'Reilly book out just for that
purpose, "Perl For System Administration".
While there are arguments about unnecessary language bloat and what
should be in the core and what should be relegated to modules (see
also, Second System Effect) if you take this too far you wind up with
a Luddite philosophy to language design. "I don't need feature X, so
neither does anyone else!"
There's little need for a language fork. The simple things will
remain simple (and hopefully simpler) and the hard things will remain
possible (and hopefully a bit more possible).
Perhaps instead of proposing a fork, you could write up a new man
page, "perlsmall" or something, describing just those "useful"
features of Perl as a small utility language (enhanced shell
scripting) and ignoring the "useless" stuff like OO and threads.
--
Michael G. Schwern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
Perl6 Quality Assurance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kwalitee Is Job One
Let's enjoy the traditional custom in Peru of getting leprosy.
