Joe Johnston [EMAIL PROTECTED] quoth: *> *>Do you trust Larry and Damain?
I wish they'd just stop circulating the Apocs so widely as every time Larry emits one there is a rash of people who think the world has needed to know or cares that it's not what they wanted or needed to use. It's the typical egocentric universe that tends to plague us even now in the
dot.bomb. It's less about trust than of wanking.
I hope that you are right. But, if the history of C++ is any guide, it is better to holler early and often in favor of simplicity. The C++ committee clearly suffered what I call "rapture of the deep" and foisted many complex and not particularly useful features on an unwitting C++ community. The result: there are almost no conforming compilers available. Sophisticated features are still best avoided due to portability problems. The C++ committee has, in fact, done a lot to deprecate C++ use and bring about a renaissance, of sorts, in C development. I am not making this up.
Due to it's single implementation, Perl should be spared the worst. But, for that same reason, the advanced features could well weigh down the language as a whole in both interpretation and execution speed.
Reliability is also an important issue. Perl is used in a great many production systems. Perl is already a bit crufty in the sense that there are many "accidental features". If the degrees-of-freedom supported by the language grows significantly, you can bet there will be many new and interesting side effects that will appear in the language. This may be a good thing, depending on your POV. But, to me, it is a source of fragility, both in the language itself and in programs written in it.
Complexity is easy. Simplicity is damned difficult. I know and trust that the Perl language designers and developers all know this fact very well. But it doesn't hurt to remind them sometimes. My guess is that the kind of nattering that bothers you so much is exactly why Larry _does_ publish the "Apocalypsos". That, and he probably is sincere in his desire for a transparent process.
take it easy, Charlie
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