Nathan Torkington wrote:
>
> David L. Nicol writes:
> > RFC: Perl6 is Final. There will Be No Perl7
> >
> > We declare that our framework willbe so flexiblke
> > that anything can be done with it and there will be no penalty
> > for something being in-core opposed to out-of-core and so on.
>
> Bad idea. You can't make anything infinitely customizable without
> making it an infinitely slow bitch. Genericity costs. I say we make
> the best perl6 we can, and let the inevitable perl7 take care of
> itself.
I think David's point is that C and several other languages have
standardized on a syntax and common development/library model. It's not
perfect, but it's stable.
>From this standpoint, I think it's a very worthwhile goal. Every Perl
release can't require a massive relearning and rewriting of the
language. Perl 6 is sort of our "last chance" to change major interface
stuff. Adding new features is a different issue.
Obviously subsequent releases will continue to evolve. But I do think
this is the last one where we can literally "take the gloves off" and
redo everything. Otherwise, Perl will get a really bad reputation for
being unstable, and it will deserve it. Perl 5 is already very stable
externally, so any big user-visible changes will have to be obviously
worthwhile in Perl 6. Most users won't tolerate Perl 7, 8, 9, and 10
continuing to break all their past scripts except minorly (I know I
won't).
This is definitely one aspect of "making things easy" that's a very
important one. Especially as the number of Perl programs continues to
explode exponentially.
-Nate
