in reply to Would you rewrite perl community?

You don't rewrite the Perl community. You do your part to make it better. It's already good because there is no central control.

The question isn't all that interesting though, since the people who actually would rewrite the community are already doing it. You just have to look at what they are doing. Everyone else talk about things that they think should happen but aren't doing anything about.

I don't think the Perl community has ever been stronger than it is right now. There are a couple of hundred user groups, several YAPCs each year, several Perl worskops take place around the world, a funded foundation that just got $70,000 from NLNet, several major forums for Perl discussion, a centralized repository of Perl code, hundreds of mailing lists and websites (thanks Ask and Robert!), major corporate interest in Perl's well being, a continuing development of the perl5 interpreter even though the cast of characters changes, the amazing development of a reference implementation for perl6, The Perl Review just finished its first year in print and is still going strong, Best Practical just announced the NJAPH awards to complement the White Camel awards, the Phalanx projects improves code that they didn't even write, almost every Perl module uploaded to CPAN is automatically tested on several platforms, Casey West is copying the CPAN concept for Javascript, and so on and so on.

Why you ask "What exactly is wrong with current perl community that it needs a rewrite?" baffles me. Ask what is wrong with other communities that don't have all this stuff.

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brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
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Re^2: How would you rewrite perl community?
by szabgab (Priest) on Jul 20, 2005 at 12:05 UTC

    Why you ask "What exactly is wrong with current perl community that it needs a rewrite?" baffles me. Ask what is wrong with other communities that don't have all this stuff.

    It's an issue of timing

    The question was based on that quotation from TPC4 back in 2000. The answer is what has been happening since then. All the nice things you mentioned are the rewriting of the community.

      We've been rewriting the community a long time before TPC4. The "perl community" in that comment is really "perl5porters" which was perceived as an insular and nasty group around then. Part of the Perl6 effort was to attract people to the effort by fixing p5p. Indeed, the extended discussion of that during the first perl6 meeting was what set Jon Orwant off.

      --
      brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>