Off late, I have been thinking a lot about Perl 5's future and I'm pretty much convinced we are going strong and will probably out do most expectations. Having said that I also believe as usual with every software there are always problems. As it is apparent we are more moving into a era where the focus is on making Perl 5 as extensible as possible. There seem to be two ways to taking it forward.

1. To make syntax experiments happen in CPAN and enable that too happen through modules like Devel::Declare and B::Hooks ets. The whole idea of this approach is to make sure the core gets as less bloat as possible. What that means is lesser maintenance headaches(As such getting core hackers is a touch difficult) Once modules like MooseX::Declare and others get sufficient PR they will automatically become the new way of doing things. At very same time the core maintenance will focus more on fixing bugs, stability, making it more easier to extend etc. Or other optimization stuff or even better threading/Concurrency/Parallelism and things like that.

The problem with this approach is there is no one true way of doing things, and there might be parallel things that hurt the overall Perl PR. And making sure a distribution is standard will become even more difficult. But a proper distribution strategy may solve this problem.

2. To bring the syntax slowly into the core, as now this will make a standard distribution. But over time will bring more bloat, more bugs and more maintenance. But this has his own advantages. The users need not have to hand assemble their environment and in todays world this is some thing that is needed. And most people would be really happy if this would happen. But this process would be slow and not very easily extensible. Not to mention a lot of effort is required to make it happen.

Now both the approaches have their own pros and cons. I feel moving with the first approach is better, albeit with a good distro policy. What is the best way out for the future? Gurus please comment.

Trolls, please keep away

In reply to What is best for the future. by Anonymous Monk

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