http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/

• Website: www.wgz.org/chromatic/
• About: I blog about Perl.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown
  Surely there must be an easier way to validate that guess then spending the next year trying one proposed solution or another, then figuring out how to measure if it worked. (Seems like measuring efficacy will be difficult if the...
• Commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown
  Instead of "real users", I should have written "The people you want to convince." I'm not sure that even a thousand people who know and care enough about the state of Perl to discuss the version number of a 5.18...
• Commented on Names and Numbers, Brand and Identity
  Perl 6 has been "the future of Perl" for almost 13 years. Perl itself is just over 25 years. I'm not sure names are the problem....
• Commented on Perl 7 - Final Thoughts
  Ruby 1.x came out in 1996 and Ruby 2.0 isn't quite out yet. The argument that "A major version number hasn't changed" doesn't work for me. The argument that Perl's Osborned itself holds more water with me, but that only...
• Commented on The JVM *could* host a Perl implementation - and do it well!
  I agree that the JVM can run some languages fast. My hypothesis is that you either work with a platform or you end up working against it, and that the assumptions of the JVM are different from the expectations of...
• Commented on 3 features I would like to see in Perl
  A better GC likely won't improve performance much in the average case. Reference counting is about as cheap as it gets, at least until you have a highly nested structure you want to free. With that said, moving the reference...
• Commented on This is not tolerated
  Thanks for clarifying. Physical assault is another category of unacceptable altogether....
• Commented on This is not tolerated
  Let's be clear though. I don't believe we're talking in the PerlMonks case about harassment, or something worth shunning another person over. At worst, the initial posting seems to me to be thoughtless rudeness, while the replies are the kind...
• Commented on I was called "fucking asshole"
  Your strong conviction explains why there are so many people on the Internet complaining about being treated with respect and kindness and good humor by other Perl users....
• Commented on You're Wrong!
  My opinions are based on my Vulcan-like efficacy of identifying and analyzing cold, hard facts. If you disagree with me, clearly you've overlooked an important fact, made an error in judgment, and (most likely) are letting emotions cloud your thinking....
• Commented on Dealing with rudeness
  Ah, ESR--king of the false dilemma. Note that people such as Larry and Tim Bunce are very good at solving problems without making other people feel small....
• Commented on Calling all Karen Pauleys...
  brian is right. Send me a message at my cpan.org address. (Is editor@perl.com bouncing? I'll look into that. I also keep meaning to add about/contact info.)...
• Commented on Perl first world problems #1
  That should be TEST_JOBS=9 for perlbrew—specifically for the Perl 5 Makefile....
• Commented on Perl first world problems #1
  Regarding perlbrew, I set HARNESS_OPTIONS to j9 in my shell. While not all CPAN modules run tests in parallel, the Perl 5 core test suite runs very nicely in parallel. Except for installations on virtual machines with very slow IO...
• Commented on Why does your site not link to perl.org?!
  Ah yes, the old "If you're not smart enough to use Lisp, Lisp doesn't want you" fallacy from some Lisp programmers. I'm glad the Perl community seems to have left that phase....
• Commented on Why does your site not link to perl.org?!
  Good reminder; Onyx Neon's site now includes that link in the footer of every page....
• Commented on LOLchromatic wonders how to stalk you
  I worry more about his use of the word "educated"--now there's something which could mislead other people!...
• Commented on How do newbies find Perl learning materials online?
  What could the front page of Perl.com include to help people find better material?...
• Commented on Authors vs. Contributors
  My philosophy is to share credit liberally. There's plenty to go around. An author is a contributor and vice versa. Maintainership is different. Someone must guide the project for the long term. If the demarcation of that responsibility must exist,...
• Commented on A compelling reason for Perl6
  I thought this was "a common blogging platform for the Perl community" and "A blog about the Perl programming language". If Randal wants to write about Perl 6, is he not a part of the Perl community? Is he not...
• Commented on A compelling reason for Perl6
  You're reading this on blogs.perl5.org?...
• Commented on The decline of Perl
  It's rich to ask for "actual proof" when the graph you posted has no explanation of the units for the Y axis. Chart. Junk....
• Commented on Why are people asking for a Perl name change again?
  I hope they're not waiting for Java 7 then....
• Commented on $perl6 = 'Duke Nukem Forever';
  Suppose perl.org and perl.com both said prominently "Perl 5 and Perl 6 are separate languages which coexist happily. The existence of one by no means obsoletes the other." That won't make everyone happy, but it's true and easy for the...
• Commented on Bead, ivory, off-white
  By "outsiders" do you mean "people who haven't used Perl 5" and possibly "people who aren't programmers"? I hadn't considered that perspective. I've approached this by thinking that anyone who's used Perl 5 much should have noticed several flaws, but...
• Commented on Bead, ivory, off-white
  At best a name change would delay the problem. More likely it would continue the problem. As a thought exercise, consider a world without Perl 6 as we understand it today. What would a successor to Perl 5 as we...
• Commented on Bead, ivory, off-white
  Three things: 1) Perl from the Outside. 0) I'm not making fun of Alberto. I don't disagree with his opinion, but if the premise holds, it should hold all the way. It doesn't. I don't know why. 2) What we...
• Commented on The difference between distros, modules, and programs; and how that affects indexing
  Thanks for the bug report. That's one reason CPAN::Dark isn't on the CPAN and might not ever be. I haven't decided if it's better off as a part of CPAN::Mini::Inject or if there are enough similar projects that attempting to...
• Commented on Moose and Fatal Type Constraints
  Certainly, but I prefer to refactor even my legacy code to this pattern. I know very little about the code you have, but my experience has been that working around the fact that controllers do far too much takes more...
• Commented on Moose and Fatal Type Constraints
  My controllers are thin. My models are fat. I like the pattern where my controller delegates everything but parameter marshalling to calls on the model. I wrap those in Try::Tiny blocks, capture any errors into an appropriate data structure, and...

Comment Threads

• LoonyPandora commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  To be clear: I think the rename is a great idea. It's a first step, and that's awesome.

  With that in mind, for this to be successful we as a community have to go all in. Doing a rename like this in a half-assed fashion will fizzle out, and end up as wasted effort in a year. We need to give it an extreme amount of energy so it gets over the tipping point and takes on a life of it's own.

  This means more than making a pretty logo, changing the version string, and saying "yay perl". It means making noise. Lots of noise. No half-assed "ironman" blogging thing that generates little…

• lordarthas.myopenid.com commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  There are so many reasons to support this idea.
  One of those I really like is that people will be able to use search engines and find something up to date when typing "pumpkin perl": there's so many outdated stone-age perl-related material that we won't be able to get rid of that without a change like this.

  So, for this and many other reasons, it's +1.

  And willing to help where I can, of course.
  

• CosmicNet commented on Perl 7 - Final Thoughts

  Lets just rename it to Peril, then go on rapid release cycle like FireFox. Then we can have a new major release every couple of months, and all the huge benefits that have come with that: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

  Of course, I'm joking.

  I can't help the feeling that if the effort from all these years of Perl 5/Perl 6 attrition, had been directed into Perl 6 as they naturally should have been, it would have been ready some time ago. Instead the dog chooses to keep chewing on it's own leg.

• raiph commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  I liked everything about mst's original Pumpkin post with one small exception -- the specific qualifier Pumpkin.

  In most ways it's outstandingly good. But it didn't leave me 100% satisfied.

  I've just seen someone's suggestion of Modern Perl, and I have to say I like it a lot. I checked whois, and shadowcat owns modernperl.com...

• Christopher Cashell commented on Pumpkin Perl Breakdown

  I like it.

  The name "Pumpkin" isn't necessarily my favorite, but I'm pretty sure that's just pure personal opinion; I can't think of any real objections to it, nor can I think of a better suggestion. There's certainly nothing wrong with it.

  I do still like the idea of year-based versioning, ideally along with the name change. If you're going to do releases based on a scheduled time-table, it makes sense to match your versions to it. However, that's something that can be considered in the future.

  I'm feeling good about this change.