Make Gabor happy please
Really, let's just stop doing that.
The thing is that people posting different--both long and short--messages online in their blogs, or commenting other people's opinion are doing one common mistake. They do not want to hear others.
Scan through the texts appeared after FOSDEM (yeah, I never liked that conference :-) most of them have the following common structure: I propose A, as B is completely insane.
I can easily enough skip personal offensive comments found in my email or tweets to me which are just rude. But what is really wrong that everybody wants his own solution to become a standard. This does not give the right to say "we the community" in these cases. That will just not work for the Perl's success.
We are all different and it's what we have to adopt and exploit rather than killing ourselves from within the group of Perl users.
I personally find it a strange idea to the name of the language, either version 5, or 6. There is the language which we all love and want to see it wealthy in the future. We all know that there are a number of small and big problems that influenced the image of Perl during the last years. But together with that after 25 years of its existence it is here, there are hundreds of people coming to the conferences (register now if you did not do it yet) and even new books appear.
For example, there was a big Ovid's Beginning Perl book published a few months ago. Just look at its contents and see that, for instance, cpanminus is mentioned there as a tool to be used for working with CPAN modules. When did you see such a modern book last time? Or how many? It means that the language is changing.
I use Perl 5 every day, I am a fan of Perl 6 and I find Perl 7 just sexy. Yes, I find it wrong that there is no usable version of Perl 6 yet. But how can anybody think that by proposing to jump a barrier which as I think will only bring younger developers to our camp and give new life forces to Perl 6, I am intentionally insulting the 6's version developers? Same applies to everybody who is actively proposing their own version of the future.
It was quite unexpectedly for me to find out that a T-shirt preview (once again, a preview of what might be a design; it even never was in any plans as there is simply no budget at the moment for any T-shirts) will cause so many aggression. Not a reaction. Aggression. We are not enemies to each other. We are all Perl user, whatever version/revision/subversion/brand it is.
For the YAPC::Europe in Kiev I found a really nice solution for the T-shirts. We will announce it tomorrow in the conference blog. (Sponsors are still needed for that idea to be implemented though :-)
Kisses.
I blog about Perl.
While you may be right, that many of the responses have been their own response, not considering that of others, there has been a benefit to it all. A few people in key positions have been able to see the will of the people (mst mentioned reading hundreds of individual messages) and has been able to distill some amount of "will of the community" from the noise.
I too agree that the Perl 6 community should not feel antagonized by the fact that Perl 5 is starting to feel limited by its version number. We have said they are distinct languages, and its time we start acting like they are. While the name is still growing on me, mst has proposed a solution that tries to address the will of the Perl 5 community (as expressed) while not treading on Perl 6.
In truth I have seen very little personal attack during this debate, and for that I have been very proud of the community. True there has been precious little of people considering other's views (I include myself here) they have rarely done so by saying "you and your ideas are studid" (with a few rare exceptions). Again, from a loftier branch, those powers that be can see which way the wind is blowing, and thats a good thing.
Perl 6, we don't dislike you! We hope for your success! Still we need room to grow, and I hope you understand that.