lichtkind

You propably seen that rant as well as what caused it. I'm neither core dev nore have 20 Modules on CPAN, but I have talked to lot of people online and in person over the years.

first of all: DON't PANIK - get your towel and realize were doing much better than most people think. seriously (like mst would say).

I say that because of two reasons. 1. its true. 2. please don't act out of a negative impulse like fear uncertainty or some mindless badmouthing of Perl. Just relax - feel like everything is allright, breathe slowly, take a .. allright you got the idea.

There also two factors you should be aware that IMO weight almost as heavy as having a "roadmap". Finally porters have a good sense of balance between fixing things, removing syntax holes and responsively introducing new stuff, mostly stuff people crying for. Make sure you don't disturb but enhance that. Secondly: we have a perl 5 core maintenance grant which pays 1-2 hardcore devs some money so they squash the ugly bugs noone wants to even touch, that is running now for 2 years or so. To me that is major improvement, which makes Perl much better, sometimes even faster, can even prepare the ground for new features.

The healthy part of a OMG- we have no roadmap- discussion (linux also don't has one) is to make suggestions to the porters what feature we should introduce. Improving communication is good and porters that have a sense what the community wants is also good. having a community sensation that things are rolling is wonderful. because we only get things done when we act together (moe (and the other perl forks) and the perl is a dead end was IMO kind a panik reaction and did not succeed because to little manpower behind). The only option I see is when everyone does his bit of duty to do what in the benefit of most people.

plus there is alread a kinda roadmap (we call it Perl 6), which will be in one way or the other the future of Perl. And there is a very simple reason for that one: there is gone more brainpower into Perl 6 than into most other languages. Why you think people start to copy Moose into js, ruby and python? Because they din't made the effort to ponder how combine all the wonderful features with a mop, even the solution was out there since the days of CLOS. We have this right before our noses and it is designed by almost the same people as Perl 5.

but in long run only counts what is being done. not what has be said. you know exactly what you can do to make Perl more enjoyable. Guess noone will do it instead of you. :)