in reply to Re: Perl 6: Managing breakages across Rakudo versions
in thread Perl 6: Managing breakages across Rakudo Star versions
Heh... and why, exactly, should anyone in this case particularly care “what Larry Wall thinks?”
“Ooops!” he said, looking fearfully straight ahead and wondering what it will feel like to become a pillar of salt ...
A few hundred million source-code lines ago, the Perl language ... having not yet achieved(!) the viability that it has achieved now ... had many options to become viable. But, once it did, it suddenly became the case that the financial(!) value of what has been made using Perl, and put into daily service, vastly outweighs the ($0.00 ...) cost of Perl itself.
At this point, what matters is that those mission-critical applications keep running. No one is asking to rewrite them; no one is in a particular hurry to spend the millions of dollars and to risk the business instability that could occur by doing so. There is no benefit; there is considerable cost; there is one hundred percent risk.
Therefore, I would frankly argue that the best thing that could be done for this Perl-6 project, if (and I now consider it to be a very big “if” ...) it ever actually sees the light of day and if, having done so, it actually proves itself to be a viable product. Being tapped as the successor of a noble ancestor, by anyone at all for any reason at all, does not guarantee or validate success.
The evil spirit replied, “I know Jesus, and I know Paul, but who are you?”
-- Acts 19:15b; New Living Translation
This is “nothing personal” and “everything practical.” There is no place for a “Perl 6” because that multi-million real-dollar place is already taken by the system that is in service. Any successor project will forever stand beside Perl-5 and must not in any way whatever jeopardize it ... most specifically, there must be zero impact to the mission-critical parts of CPAN.
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Re^3: Perl 6: Managing breakages across Rakudo versions
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jul 19, 2012 at 17:40 UTC |