| Every technical decision maker worried about the Perl 5->6 transition over the last few years is someone who didn't actually do the kind of diligence a good technical decision maker should do. That's unfair. The current motto of the p6 faithful has become "It's a sister language not intended to replace Perl" over the years, but a lot of things have changed over the years. If and when a usable p6 is released, who knows what the motto will be then? You brushed over the Python 2 to 3 migration, but at least that one had a coherent strategy. It's not an easy strategy, but there's an end of support date for Python 2. There's a widespread effort to port libraries and frameworks and projects to Python 3. That hasn't happened yet for Perl. It's not clear if that's ever going to happen for Perl. No one is exactly sure how much of the CPAN p6 will support, if any. Will people start writing more new code in p6 instead of Perl? Will people port code from one to the other? Will p6 be able to use existing libraries? Will those libraries be usable in the same process? When will p6 be stable? When will it have documentation? When will it have support, from a community point of view or a vendor or bundling in a supported distribution? When will it have tool support? What is its deprecation policy? What is its support period? Who will use it? What will they use it for? How much training do they need? How much do they charge? How easy is it to hire them? There are so many unknowns. It's unfair to sweep them under the rug and say "Everyone should know that Perl is Perl and 6 is something else and the latter doesn't matter." |
I guess I don't see why that's an important question when:
- there's no horizon on which a complete implementation (or stable target for a spec/test suite, for that matter) is promising to arrive
- 5.x has demonstrated it's a living/growing branch with as much a future as any open source project
- By comparison, for something like Python, the concrete reality of having a plan for changing horses midstream seems to be more painful than just keeping on with Perl 5
Or are those false assumptions?
I don't really expect everyone to keep up with everything about Perl. I'd certainly had no idea 5.10 was even a glimmer in someone's eye for over a year after it had come out because I was busy with front-end work and PHP projects. And I'm responding partly because maybe I've missed something again and this is a learning opportunity.
At the same time, when someone speaks up as the GP did and asserts that technical decision makers have done their homework and picked things like Python or Java by comparison to insulate themselves from the spectre of version shifts and associated porting costs, I think they may have earned themselves a challenge.