use Perl

• Diversity is the new Uniformity (Score:2)

  by brian_d_foy (44)

  Actually, I don't think you get it :)
  
  You're not diversifying. You're un-difersivify. ActiveState was diversity. It was a different source for Perl and for modules. Now you've made Perl come from the same source everyone else uses and download modules from the same source that everyone else uses.
  
  I think it's that diversity which hurt Perl for a long time on Windows. Instead of having Srawberry Perl ten years ago, we let ActiveState have that domain. With ActiveState, no one had any incentive to work that har
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Alias (5735)

    I hereby note that Strawberry supports CPAN, direct tarball installation via pip, PPM modules/repositories, PAR archives, and the .P5I install scripts, both locally and from URIs.
    
    Instead of just PPMs from a single repository.
    
    Voila, diversity :)
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Ron Savage (5224)

      I haven't tried pip, although I have used Strawbs.
      
      Direct installation from CPAN is a great relief, because without it I was thinking of donating to you $1000 for a build farm and pre-compiled repository, and now you're 'saved' me the money!
      
      As for the command line app, instead of cpan, we're surely call it peter.pan, except neither of our names is Peter :-O.
      
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    To be fair, it was a huge advantage that there were people interested in Perl who knew how to write code for Windows and actually did.

    I've abandoned a few projects because I couldn't get them to run on Windows and was sick of Windows users complaining but never actually trying to help fix things.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Alias (5735)

      I'll note that the "people interested in Perl who knew how to write code for Windows and actually did" group doesn't really include me.
      
      I am interesting, and I prefer to "actually do", but really I don't know how to write code for Windows.
      
      I muddle through in a couple of areas (like File::HomeDir) but mostly I just bug OTHER people to make their stuff work on Win32. I mean, I didn't create the original Vanilla MinGW setup, I didn't create the original .exe builder, and I didn't do much of the toolchain portin
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        The the beauty for me is that, once set up, I do almost none of the work, and still get a ton of the credit :)

        What I am saying is that -- without taking credit from anyone working on Vanilla, Strawberry, or Chocolate Perl -- ActiveState still deserves tremendous credit for making it possible to run the same code on Windows as Unix and Unix-like systems.

        I'll push toward the front of the line for criticizing ActiveState's technical decision to push backwards compatibility and kill all hopes of getting m
        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Alias (5735)

          On this point, I agree completely.
          
          They deserve a lot of kudos for the port, but in the last 5 years they've failed to live up to their previous standards in my opinion.
• getting it (Score:1)

  by markjugg (792)

  Adam, I think you do "get it", and your work is much appreciated. Thanks!
  
        Mark
• Important journal (Score:1)

  by mr_bean (3802)

  The whole set of blogs connected to Andy Lester's TIMTOWDI interpretation [perlbuzz.com] is a valuable one.
  
  Brian Foy's crystallization [perl.org] of the difference in viewpoints as "Diversity is the New Uniformity" is apt.
  
  Perhaps we can say the dialectic is one between the new and the old. Old (established) beats new and new beats old. Can't live with it. Can't live without it.
  
  Zbigniew Lukasiak links to an eye-opening Puppet discussion of ruby gems [madstop.com] and other languages' distribution problems, contributed to by Russ Allber
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    I think Perl really benefited from appealing to the sysadmin crowd back when it did. The people who set up CPAN were sysadmins, not programmers, so they approached the question quite differently from the various people who’ve tried to create a CPAN clone for another language in more recent times. Most of them try to recreate everything provided by the entire CPAN infrastructure, and then add even more features, in one fell swoop. Even the CPAN6 project fell into this trap. In contrast, sysadmins tend