use Perl

I discussed this with Simon Phipps once; I said I'd wished Jonathan Schwartz had given more direct promissory estoppel with regard to patents and free software. Simon suggested that anyone who received the JDK (for example) under the GPL was already a part of the JDK community and, therefore, subject to the patent licensing.

I'm insufficiently familiar with the differences between the GPL v2 and v3 with regard to patent licensing, but I believe it's possible to make a strong argument that making a program available under the GPL v2 offers promissory estoppel, at least from the copyright holder.

I'm not aware of any case law to this effect, however.

The irony of the vulnerability of Dalvik versus a fork of the JVM is indeed interesting.

In your opinion, is the patent grant of the GPL v2 insufficient protection?

I believe that T::B was Schwern's idea; I happened to implement the first version.

Certainly there's a touch of tautology in my original statement, but that makes it no less true. We can't know what might have arisen in a world without Perl 6, but we can say that a relentless expunging of every influence of Perl 6 in the Perl 5 ecosystem would cripple modern Perl as we understand it now.

I could speculate as to whether Perl circa 2010 in that hypothetical universe would be better, worse, or different from as we understand it now, but I won't. What happened happened, and many of those happenings began to happen in 2000.

There can't be any evidence that modern Perl wouldn't have happened in one form or another if Perl 6 didn't exist.

I pay little attention to that hypothetical situation because we live in a world where Perl 6 does exist. My assertion is that it's easy to demonstrate how Perl 6 inspired, influenced, and instigated many parts of modern Perl: make a list of features of modern Perl, figure out who started them and why, and correlate those to the development of Perl 6.

I already mentioned testing. Consider Moose, then Devel::Declare, then regular release cycles.

I see no distinction. You might as well say "Without Perl 6, we'd have modern Perl anyway!" as "Without Perl 6, we'd have flying cars by now!" Absent a time machine, empiricism doesn't work that way.

Schwern wrote Test::Simple and then Test::More as part of an overhaul of Perl 5 testing to prepare for Perl 6; he was the chair of the Perl QA working group formed as part of the Perl 6 working groups. I extracted Test::Builder from both at Schwern's suggestion.

Maybe in a hypothetical parallel universe where Perl 6 never existed....

Only the solipsists among us can do anything other than theorize over what might have happened if or if not. What happened happened. Immature poets imitate and mature poets steal -- in part because mature poets have no trouble crediting their inspirations.

Perl 6 was a precondition for modern Perl.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 30 June 2010. Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Allison:

• working on Parrot packages for Debian experimental
• seems like a good idea to do that before the 2.6 supported release
• there was also a request for Rakudo packages
• not sure if I'm the best person to do it

Patrick:

• I'm sure we should package Rakudo Star

This took longer than I expected, but the draft of the Modern Perl book is available for review. I'm especially interested in hearing from people who don't consider themselves expert Perl 5 programmers. The goal of the book is to explain how Perl 5 works (and how to write Perl 5 effectively) to help novices become adepts.

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 16 June 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, Will, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 09 June 2010. Larry, Allison, Patrick, and chromatic attended.

Larry:

Put forth a credible proposal and people will follow.

Did you mean "Do something worth following"?

Hence it's easy to do something "obvious" and get it very wrong.

Some hybrid systems use simple refcounting but occasionally run a full GC to reclaim circular references. As well, it's certainly possible to use a mortalize scheme for simple escape analysis to catch the majority of cases where you want timely destruction; most objects tend to have reference counts of zero or one.