Update: I realize the title will likely be mis-interpreted as an indictment of Perl's speed. No, no. It is just a play on the NYT title... a meditation on the speed of its development.

Dear monks,

I was reading NYTimes.com "Windows Is So Slow, but Why?" (registration required, unfortunada). The following para triggered an analogous thought vis a vis Perl --

And a crucial reason Microsoft holds more than 90 percent of the PC operating system market is that the company strains to make sure software and hardware that ran on previous versions of Windows will also work on the new one — compatibility, in computing terms.

As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."

Any new design of Perl has to ensure that legacy code doesn't break. The crown jewel of Perl (besides perlmonks.org, of course) is CPAN. However, if a new Perl decided to break from the past, it would break its ties with CPAN as well. A newer language such as Ruby doesn't have that baggage. There is really no way around this conundrum. Then, there is the accompanying conundrum -- if a new Perl broke away from its past so that it became a radically new language, what attraction would it have for me? Wouldn't I be just as well attracted to replace Perl with Ruby in my world?

So, the designers of the new Perl have an unenviable task -- make the language sufficiently new so it can ditch its substantive cruft, but is still compatible with the bales of crufty code out there AND ditch its formative cruft so it looks modern, yet is not so new that it is like learning a new language.

Almost seems like Apple had it a lot easier than the Perl community has. Suddenly I feel like empathizing with Microsoft and its Windows-woes.

Console me.

--

when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

In reply to Perl Is So Slow, but Why? by punkish

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