Perl 5 Porters Weekly: June 10-16, 2013
Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the perl5-porters email list.
Topics this week include:
- [PATCH] use dots - allow '.' instead of '->' everywhere and concat with '~'
- NWCLARK TPF grant April report
- I made t/podcheck.t less sensitive and fixed various pod issues
- perl needs safer implicit close
- An observation: Short- vs. long-term benefits
- [PATCH] Add an API to attach a signature string to a CV
- Perl experiments
[PATCH] use dots - allow '.' instead of '->' everywhere and concat with '~'
During his lightning talk on the last day at YAPC, Chip Salzenburg mentioned he'd just finished a patch to use dots instead of the arrow for method dispatch and hash traversal. The patch was formally submitted the P5P just after I had finished posting my summary. Throughout the week a lively and opinionated discussion about the patch occurred until Ricardo made the call on Friday night about whether to ship this or not. He wrote:
Initially, I said I was leaning toward applying this because of popular acclaim. It would have been more accurate to say that I wanted to avoid a lot of angry email. I don't want to make decisions based on fear, because then whoever screams loudest wins.
I don't think dots.pm would be good for perl, and am not going to ship it in 5.20.
Stevan Little spoke for many when he tweeted:
.@OvidPerl and as much as I would have loved to see it, I know that @rjbs++ is right #sometimesamansgottadowhatamansgottado
— Stevan Little (@stevanlittle) June 14, 2013
NWCLARK TPF grant April report
Nicholas Clark filed his TPF grant report for April; a great read to keep up with the vital things the grant pays for.
I made t/podcheck.t less sensitive and fixed various pod issues
There's been a long-running mostly civil exchange about a commit made a few weeks ago about a pod check test. RJBS stepped in and wrote in part:
I feel like this situation is flying (with excruciating slowness) off the handle.
[...]
[P]ushing a change like this, when there is probably going to be some disseent, especially from those who have already done work on the code, is going to have a cost in morale.
[...]
I believe the solution to "too much petty bickering" is "better discussions," not preemptive commits. The latter leads to bad feelings and edit wars, not a culture of teamwork and peer review.
perl needs safer implicit close
One of the things Ricardo Signes mentioned in his YAPC talk "Postcards from the Edge" was that he wanted to see Perl gain a safer implicit close in 5.20. This week he posted a message to that effect on the P5P list.
An observation: Short- vs. long-term benefits
Steffen Mueller posted a short note about some of the criticism on the "." vs "->" patch because some of the reactions were that a change like this has no short term benefit to the language.
[PATCH] Add an API to attach a signature string to a CV
Peter Martini asked the P5P list to review his patch to the magic API.
Perl experiments
RJBS has been posting all of the experiments. Here's a collection of the messages:
Weekly p5p summaries