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troll? FUD? Hidden Agenda? (Score:1)
Who are you, 'pozer' (you didn't fill out your profile), and on what authority can you say that chromatic (see: http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/ [perl.org], http://search.cpan.org/~chromatic/ [cpan.org], http://www.modernperlbooks.com/ [modernperlbooks.com]) is a "troll", "ignorant", or "closed minded". His agenda also seems to be rather un-hidden.
I'm sad that RGS doesn't want to be pumpking any longer, and I know that pumpking is a difficult task requiring intense commitment.
But, I'm also sad that new Perl users still have to be given a 20-year history lesson to understand that some extremely useful pragmas and other functionality can't be the default because some non-contributing users (who only use perl as a "bash on steroids" anyway) might have to look at code they wrote 15 years ago before upgrading their perl (even though they haven't upgraded in 5 years.) If the users who don't write new Perl code are given this much priority in the language's design, this sends a pretty clear message that Perl is not intended for writing new code.
And I still can't understand why users who don't want Perl to change are the slightest bit concerned about whether a new version changes. If you aren't ever going to upgrade, it won't affect you!
Those of us who have written Perl in the last 10 years won't have a problem with the sort of changes chromatic has been proposing -- and if we still have a mix of crufty old code in-house we know how to deal with that.
The alternative to updating old code is, of course, to rewrite everything in a different language. If Perl is not going to change, that sort of rewrite is going to keep happening and there won't be any point in shipping a new version.
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