> > What we're doing about that:
> > * pushing the output through Larry
> > [Yes, this addresses only part of the problem. Any suggestions for
> > other ways to solve this?]
>
> The RFC mountain is way, way too high to be climbed by just one person,
> let alone the output of the various mailing lists. What about a litlle
> good old-fashioned dictatorship, or at least a Junta?
Well, as I suggested once before (but it was probably premature at the
time), I think people should start retracting RFC's that they don't
think are wins, or that the general consensus is against. I'm going to
retract 3 of my own today. I think we should aim at giving Larry stuff
that we're really confident is "the right decision", and providing 8 or
9 conflicting RFC's on the same subject is probably not a good thing to
do. For example, here are some that directly conflict, and that we
should probably try to reach some type of internal consensus on:
lvalue subs: RFC's 107, (118), 132, 149
sub prototypes: RFC's 57, 97, 98
list ops: RFC's 45, 82
basic OO: RFC's 95, 101
vars and scoping: RFC's 6, 16, 19, 106
By "consensus", I *don't* mean a "vote" - like many have noted,
designing language by committee is *very* bad. If we can't reconcile our
differences, so be it. But if pretty much everyone ends up feeling the
same way, we should keep the proposal that makes the most *sense* and
retire the others. This means sometimes realizing your wishes won't be
fulfilled in favor of language consistency (like I realized recently
with "@a || @b" :-( ). I have a good deal of confidence in the combined
brainpower on these lists to be able to do this.
Finally, one thing I'd like to add is this: Just because many of us
haven't been on p5p for the past many years doesn't necessarily mean
we're inexperienced with conquering challenging projects. I'm not going
to claim to be in the same class as Larry, Tom, Randal, or any of the
other hardcore Perl hackers - and I certainly will never pretend to be -
but that doesn't mean I can't potentially contribute some pretty useful
ideas and code to the project. I think the p5p'ers should be ecstatic
that so many people came out to "try out" for the p6 team. This is a
great opportunity for lots of new blood to be infused into the Perl
development force.
Anyways, that's my input, I'll shut up now.
-Nate
