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Perl Features of the Future - Part 2

Posted by michael on from the featuritis dept.

Kevin writes "This story is a follow up to yesterday's part 1 (hence the name) on the changes in Perl 6. Damian Conway (design team member): "There will be some learning involved, but it isn't like learning an entirely new language," he said. "It's more like adding a few new words to your vocabulary." It seems the perl intrepreter is getting overhauled as well."

1 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Perl designers looking for work by Slorf · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This quote surprised me a little bit.

    "Like so many others in the IT industry, all three of us [Conway, Sugalski and Wall] have been looking for work," he noted.

    In fact, this bothers me a lot. The company I work for, along with an extremely huge number of other corporations, have benefitted imensely from Perl. Oracle and many other products have custom Perl builds integrated with their products. Why is it that Larry Wall should have to be looking for work? Shouldn't he and the others be quite well off from the enormous benefit that he has provided the technology industry?

    This is the biggest thing that scares me about open source. I don't want to sound anti-capitalistic here, but how many companies are reaping the benefits of the hard work Larry and other open source developers put into their excellent projects, but don't give a dime to those developers? How many members of the contributing Perl Foundation were corporate sponsors?

    I advocate open source languages and products all the time, but I can see a danger. That danger comes from folks like those at Lindows. They take stuff that others have freely contributed, sell it, retire early in the Bahamas, and the developers who made it possible wind up serving lattes in a second job to support their families.

    I can see open sourcing and donating useful utilities (I'm in the process of doing so this week), but I can't see myself putting in the time and energy into designing something as complex as an operating system kernel or programming language for free. Yes, the potential for peer recognition and hero status among geeks is tremendous, but the frustration of seeing someone else profit from my selfless contribution would take away the sweetness. Sorry, I'd rather devote those free hours to my kids or to a worthwhile charity. The rewards from those activities are even more valuable than alpha geek status.