use Perl

• "Hated" ideas people? (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25) on 2001.12.14 12:04 (#2323) Journal

  I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that I hate the ideas people in Perl. Some of them have done some amazing work, spurring on patchers and committers. If anything, I'd classify myself in the ideas camp rather than the patchers. (Schwern accuses me of giving coming up with the idea for Semi::Semicolons; I rest my case about the ideafolk being mostly useless :-)

  I remember a couple of years ago falling into the "Replace POD to XML" camp, until tchrist set me straight. I've also been painfully aware whenever that argument resurfaces, along with a couple of other latent memes that circulate through the Perl community. Like replacing Perl's syntax with XML, so we don't have to worry about maintaining a parser anymore (duh!), or the more recent resurgent meme that Parrot is a folly and we should just use a Scheme VM for Perl6...

  It's important to keep a beginner's mind here, otherwise we'd be a pretty boring and exceptionally stagnant development community. But a room full of beginner's minds generally won't get threading done right, fix the thread safety of regexes, integrate Unicode into the core or reintegrate EBCDIC. So we need both, and Perl6's release valve offers a way for the two groups to coexist more peacefully than before.

  Reply to This

  • Replace Parrot with a scheme engine? (Score:1)

    by pdcawley (485)

    Can't say I've come across that meme in the wild.
    
    Plenty of scepticism about the whole Perl 6 enterprise, but I've not seen the 'use scheme' thing.
    • Re:Replace Parrot with a scheme engine? (Score:2)

      by Elian (119)

      The 'use scheme' stuff's part of the aftermath of the LL1 workshop held at MIT in November. links off of the website for it [mit.edu] somewhere.