Re: kurila 1.3 released Moin,

On Saturday 13 October 2007 10:01:01 demerphq wrote:
> On 10/13/07, chromatic  wrote:
[snip]
> > My point was that Python 3000's Resources knob has settings higher
> > than 1.5, which is sadly where the Perl 6 and Perl 5 knobs have
> > been stuck, combined, for several years now.
> >
> > If I count correctly, the only person actually spending any day-job
> > time working on Perl 5 or 6 with any official blessing from an
> > employer is Jan. Maybe Rafael.
>
> Then you missed the year I worked fulltime on perl. Or am I not
> included because my employer was me? Admittedly once I started
> working on a new job, writing a book, and moving house my
> contributions dropped to zero, but thats life.

I have poured way over thousand hours the into BigInt project, and you 
could say my employer "funded" that by paying me a salary for the day 
so I have something to eat while working on Perl5 at night. Or maybe it 
doesn't count because it was all done as a hobby in my spare time? :)

> And to comment on this thread, im with Aristotle here. There seems to
> be a tendency in Perl circles to take the position that there are
> only two possibilities, a) work on Perl6, a totally new language, or
> b) maintain Perl 5 with 0 tolerance for backcompat breakage.
>
> I think there is a middle ground. Try to keep as much of Perl5 as
> possible but focus on cleaning up the internals and if a few things
> of Perl5 must be sacrificed to achieve this then so be it. And I
> include the XS code out there in the "few things".
>
> This isnt a binary scenario people, its not just a choice of Perll5
> versus Perl6, there are other options. And I think Kurila does belong
> on list for the time being as it proves that there is another choice.
> Having said that Im not super keen on Kurila as I dont think its
> aimed at the problems that I think hold Perl5 back. But its mere
> existence proves that there are more options than are conventionally
> postulated. And I think that reminder is important to this community.
> Personally i think that if we can start thinking outside of the box a
> bit we might realize that there is a perfectly viable future for
> perl5 that doesn't involve being slavishly devoted to backwards
> compatibility and that isn't called Perl6.

FWIW I agree. In my opinion, the backwards compatibily is Perl5 greatest 
strength - but also the biggest obstactle to any optimization 
whatsoever. Whenever you start optimizing something, someone points out 
that this *might* break some code out there, no matter how wrong, 
buggy, or backwrads the code is, not to mention when it uses 
side-effects and undocumented features.

I am just glad I got away breaking a few things with BigInt because 
no-one was minding or looking. The interface is still quite archaic at 
some places, but by breaking a few things I could at least sanitize 
*some* things like numify(1) eq '1' and not '+1' etc.

With the 100% backwards compatibility bondage-mentality, you couldn't 
even fix bugs or get rid of totally insane "features". :(

So I am glad that someone tries to explore what happens if you get rid 
of a few very obscure things and breaks a few eggs to see if the 
omelett tastes better afterwards :)

All the best,

Tels

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