Stuart A Johnston

• About: I blog about Perl.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Perl 7
  No, I don't want Moe. What I want is a Perl 5 interpreter that is compatible with 90% of CPAN but is not afraid to break the other 10% (not to mention the DarkPAN) when it is necessary to improve...
• Commented on On the version number succeeding Perl 5
  Why all the hate on CGI.pm? Don’t like it, don’t use it....
• Commented on Perl 7
  This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for i686-linux I like Perl 5, v20 but the name doesn't really matter. We need two interpreters, two development groups. P5P needs to split. One for backwards-compatible Perl 5 and...

Comment Threads

• arrestee commented on Perl 7

  There's a problem here that I don't see being discussed. "Perl7" or "Perl2013" or "Perl Foo" is a fork, plain and simple. The 5.xx line will not end just because somebody decides to evolve Perl5 into something not quite compatible with what it was. There will still have to bug fixes, which means maintainers, which means itches to scratch and ideas to try. In short order, we will have Perl v5.2x, and Perl6, AND Perl 20xx.

  Stevan Little already explained that one of the reasons he decided to build from scratch with Moe is that there's a serious shortage or surgeons qualified to o…

• Wendy commented on Perl 7

  Perl 6 already has Rakudo with a monthly release cycle with year and month in the name. At the moment we can all work with Rakudo Star 2013.01 and work is being done on 2013.02.

  Renaming Perl 5.20 to Perl 7 and skipping Perl 6 is throwing away man-years of work, energy, inspiration. Just talking about it might demotivate everybody in the community of Perl 6 developers.

  Many people are not interested at all in Perl 6, even not knowing that enormous efforts are made to make Perl 6 more and more backwards compatible with Perl 5, and giving Perl 6 more features that people are w…

• CosmicNet commented on Perl 7

  I believe that such action would be a real nail in the coffin. After all the talk of Perl 6 being the language of the future, people see a Perl 7 release, think "Wow lets take a look" and Perl becomes a laughing stock when they all see it's just a patched Perl 5. What's worse this would jeopardise Perl 6, and all that's gone into it. I think a better title would have been "How to wipe Perl out for good with a simple version number change" or more simple "The Perl 7 one liner of death".

  Perl 6 is the future, an I firmly believe it'll fix everything. If people are impatient then the so…

• Matt S Trout (mst) commented on Perl 7

  As an alternative idea - how about we pick a name rather than getting even further into the numbers game?

  See my blog post on the subject for my suggestion as to what to pick.

  -- mst, out

• Ether commented on On the version number succeeding Perl 5

  I can see not wanting some warnings to be fatal, but it’s so rare to need to disable certain warnings entirely (e.g. numeric) that I’d be firmly on the side of keeping them enabled.

  Another change one could make in such a release is to do all the things tchrist lists as needed for full unicode and utf8 compliance: http://stackoverflow.com/a/6163129/40468