in reply to Would you rewrite perl community?

I think that at the start of the Perl 6 project, the thought was that the community would have substantial input into the next version of Perl and may even take over the bulk of the development from Larry Wall and his small coterie; transform from the cathedral to the baazar in the design space, too.

It hasn't really worked out that way. Although there was a tremendous amount of input from the community in the form of suggestions for Perl6, it turned out that it is really hard to design a coherent language by community. So by universal acclimation, Larry once again became the lead designer and arbiter of good linguistic taste. Ironically, the perl6 community process has made more work for Larry, not less...

I don't see any major problems with the Perl community. But one could always suggest improvements.

One thing I would like to see is a site (or a section of Perlmonks) with an active community of module reviewers. CPAN is an embarassment of riches these days. Whether you want to multiply a matrix, create a template, parse a log, or train a neural network, there are multiple modules available and little information discussing their relative merits. Something like a Hitchhiker's Guide to CPAN would be useful in making sense of it all.

-Mark

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Re^2: How would you rewrite perl community?
by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Jul 11, 2005 at 20:14 UTC

    Larry was always going to be the language designer. He got that title at the first Perl 6 meeting. However, the community part came in during the long RFC period. No matter how you slice it, someone has to make the decision. I'll take Larry's decisions about the language over any committee's. I don't see that this created more work for him compared to Perl 5 since he doesn't have to implement it this time. :)

    There is already a community of module reviewers: CPAN Ratings, CPAN Forum, and the new AnnoCPAN (a TPF grant funded project). While it might be nice to have such a thing at Perlmonks, the great thing about the Perl community is that everything doesn't live under one roof. If you want something done, you can just do it. You don't have to ask for permission or wait for a cabal to implement it. If you want the Hitchhiker's Guide to CPAN, get typing. It sounds like the subject of a good Meditation. :)

    Update: I forgot about CPAN Forum. I intended no slight. ;)
    --
    brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com>
[reply]
      ... CPAN Ratings, and the new AnnoCPAN ...

      There's also CPAN Forum.

      If you want the Hitchhiker's Guide to CPAN, get typing.

      ++. There already are places to post module reviews -- let's use them.

[reply]
      That would be spelled CPAN::Forum
[reply]

In Section Meditations