On Monday 28 January 2002 21:54, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > The third group that won't be happy with Perl 6 are those who program > > in a limited subset of Perl - so limited, in fact, that they will > > most likely be bitten by minor changes in the language, without the > > benefit of experiencing the major improvements that those changes > > allowed. These people are, by and large, not professional > > programmers, but folks for whom Perl is a simple and powerful tool in > > their jobs, and it will drive them crazy when their toolkits and > > recipes stop working. I should know, I support multitudes of these > > people. > > Just out of curiosity, what percentage of Perl users would you say fall > into this category?
I wouldn't. :-) If there's one thing that I have learned in my "travels" throughout the technical world, it's that Perl can and does show up in the strangest of places. And for every use that I've seen, there are probably a hundred more. Another thing that is difficult in classifying the third group is the delineation between Perl and the problem domain. If you use all of the core Perl features strictly to do web page generation, are you using a small or large subset of Perl? From a practical perspective, very little of a computer language is the language itself. I would, however, be so bold to say that these mailing lists are a poor representation of the Perl community at large, and of the group in question specifically. But even if they are a silent majority, do we need to cater to their unspoken requirements? That, ultimately, is *the* question. And the answer already lies within the Perl philosophy of making the hard things easy without making the easy things hard. Most of the minor changes that will affect the casual camel jockey are a change from the simple to the simple. They'll make the occasional mistake. And they'll get frustrated. But the changes won't be difficult to learn. In the meantime, many folks who have struggled to do wondrously difficult things in Perl will now do even more wondrously difficult things - and, what is more, those wondrously difficult things will make what was previously unaccessable available. Or so the theory goes. Of course, then there's Damian, who will reach the point of doing everything that's impossible simultaneously... and in constant time. > > And should follow-ups to this go, perhaps, to [EMAIL PROTECTED]? If we were to discuss *why* it's good for non-professional folks, probably. I'll let someone else cross-post if they feel it's necessary. -- Bryan C. Warnock [EMAIL PROTECTED]
