I was a strong advocate for the inclusion of say into the language.

Indeed, I even implemented it, and a generic "feature enablement" feature and offered the patch, but it was rejected. Something about not having enough *nixie-isms or some such.

3 or 4 years later say turned up with a bunch of other new features -- I'd list 'em, but i would have to look them up; that's how much impact they had.

Anyways, I tried it -- say -- for a while. I added the incantation use 5.010; to my "new .pl template", and made a concious effort to type say instead of print. But then I got bitten by some weird interaction between one of my 'standard idioms' and one of the other new features that construct enabled -- something to do with so called Smart Matching -- and so I backed that out and went for the more verbose: use feature qw[ say ]; instead.

But then I encountered a situation where say didn't work properly without my adding a bunch of extra parens -- something to do with it having been implemented as a "low-precedence keyword" or some such -- and well, it just seemed more hassle than reverting to my long time habit of -l on the shebang line.

So I reverted to that.

Since then, there have been a rash of new major versions; each of which has included some new feature -- singular -- or other. I'm not really sure what they are though. The "New version release" announcements always seem to favour quoting some gob of Tolkien or Tolkien-eque prose and re-iterating a long list of contributors than actually telling the world why the new version was released and what benefits come from adopting it.

And here I sit, still using 5.10.1 because the equation of the effort involved in upgrading versus the benefits that might accrue from doing so, hasn't (yet) swung in favour of the latter. It is almost there. I almost made the leap to 5.14 recently, but with the impending arrival of 5.16, I decided to hang on a little longer and so defer the pain a little longer.

In my (one, unimportant perl user's) opinion: the development/release schedule over the last few years/cycles has been more about satisfying the fashionistas needs -- keeping up with the Hanssons; being seen to be actively "moving forward"; change for change sake -- and the search for post-modernism, than the actual long terms needs of the language and its (current & long term) users.

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'
Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

The start of some sanity?

In reply to Re: Measure twice, cut once by BrowserUk
in thread Measure twice, cut once by educated_foo

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