The language we need to change is not Perl. It's the language we use
in talking about Perl. In particular, Perl people need to get rid of
that (sigh) chip on their shoulder. (Whereas having Chip on your
shoulder could only help you be a better programmer.) I've heard that
tone since I first I spent time around more experienced Perl
programmers, and I'm still convinced it's one of the reasons neither
bottom-up nor top-down Perl advocacy is all that successful.
Although I find it hard to understand what exactly you mean by top down
or bottom up advocacy, I suspect part of the problem is advocacy full stop.
Perl has long been a meritocracy. This is not an egalitarian
environment. Simply put, the people that do not contribute do not count.
That people advocating change have trouble being heard at the language
level is to be expected. Change in general at the language surface is
not good. Perl is a mature language and there's 10-20 million lines of
code sitting on top of it, just in the CPAN.
As the owner or maintainer of a whole bunch of that code, I'm happy with
the scenario that they ignore 99% of the suggestions made, and keep
their part of the stack stable.
I'm more than happy to continue improving the parts I care about,
writing new code to do what I want, and otherwise get on with getting
things done.
There's nobody stopping you adding things that you want.
After several years of adding things that I want I still feel that for
the most part very little of what I might have to contribute here is
relevant.
I don't have a decade or so of experience hacking the Perl internals, so
for the most part I don't feel I have the qualifications to even start
to make a case for changes, although I hope I might have earned the
right to point out negative downstream consequences from time to time,
since I have a reasonably amount of visibility there.
I Am No Special Flower.
Advocacy is mostly people telling other people what to do. And that
doesn't have much of a history here.
Adam K
