[tester34]

so basically perl team glues stuff with handy workarounds and says that everything's fine on social medias meanwhile behind the scenes everybody knows that this is mess

and now people argue with $Leader basing on PR statements that everything's fine?

lolxd,

I mean .NET which has very good compiler engineers used something similar to that `use v7` - `#enable nullable` and I guess it worked kinda for them, it looks bad but probably is handy.

Both seems to have reasons, but pretending that everything's fine is bad imo.

[mith__]

not quite?

the longer story is:

last summer a plan was revealed (and hatched in secret) to change the default behavior of perl's interpreter. perl not being a language where binaries are distributed in a compiled manner, but code is and then compiled on the system, this would break a LOT OF STUFF.

9 months were spent on trying to explain this, and how versioning the language is the only way forward without causing linux distros to drop perl

part of the disagreement was "but if we can never remove cruft, then adding new features is impossible". several core c developers opined "this is not true".

now yesterday it was announced that instead of changing defaults, `use 7;` would be implemented to collapse several lines of boilerplate and make code marked such behave more friendly.

someone asked about the cruft, and the above discussion ensued

imo the primary issue appears to be that sawyer took a lot of the criticisms of the perl 7 change defaults plan personally

------

i'd like to reply, but hn thinks waiting 50 minutes ain't enough

sawyer was a manager, not a c developer of the perl core, and he replied to a thread mst started, so i disagree with your characterizations

vvvv

[fennecfoxen]

From the thread linked, it looks like the primary issue is that there's just too much fighting.

It's not that people disagree (although they do), it's that the disagreement means constant war: arguing about the plan's legitimacy, the insistence that he justify everything to someone, respond to them in detail (on Twitter!), read their preferred set of emails on the matter, on demand whenever the aggressor wants, in forums like Twitter not appropriate for this discussion -- and that he expects to be punished with demands for this attention, continually, and thus have no peace.

If the maintainer says "no, please, leave me alone," he will not be left alone. His legitimacy in seeking peace is denied, his motives are questioned, his plan described as nefarious, ("hatched in secret"), ill will be spoken of him behind his back, and so on.

This is an asymmetrical exchange that wears someone down over time.

[Grinnz]

No one demanded he respond to every rebuttal in detail. Every reply presented alternate evidence which stands on its own without characterization. It was an asymmetrical exchange, but because one of the people involved was an authority figure. Aside from the position, everyone involved could equally be considered a "Perl maintainer" (that is, not very much for any of us).