The Perl 6 List

Reading the latest LWN pointer to the latest update on the state of Perl 6 development, and some of the associated comments, rather inspired me to some cheap lulz.

In all seriousness, though, Perl is stuck in a horrid no mans’ land. Ten years of aggressive rework of Perl 5 (for example, making Moose part of the core and refactoring to spread it around the high points of CPAN) would be a lot better than the state of things now. Meanwhile PHP, Python, and Ruby have eaten a fairly large portion of what used to be Perl’s lunch. Particularly poignant is this quote from Larry Wall:

Maybe it would help if you thought of Perl 6 as something more like Perl 16 or so. We’re just trying to skip over the 20 years of deprecation cycles and dead ends it would take to evolve Perl 5 into Perl 16 piecemeal, even assuming that were culturally possible, which it really isn’t. Plus I’m too Impatient to wait that long.

We’re halfway into that 20 years, and we don’t seem to have half of that progress. I guess this is more grist for Joel Spolsky’s mill.