The Perl Foundation Gets New Leadership

Andy Lester writes to tell us that the Perl foundation has named a new president and steering committee members. Bill Odom landed the seat of president, replacing Allison Randal who has occupied the seat since 2002. From the article: "Founded in 2000, The Perl Foundation (TPF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation based in Holland, Michigan, established to advance the use and development of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code."

Comments

Re:There will always be a place for Perl.

[chromatic]

Multi-dispatch, junctions, roles, rules and grammars, a much improved VM, asynchronous IO, working threads, an event system, continuations and coroutines, optional typing and type inferencing, an immensely improved FFI, interoperability with other languages including Perl 5, an improved object system, hyperoperators, unification of blocks and closures, properties, object-like built-ins, improved reflection and introspection, improved consistency, improved clarity, and improved distribution possibilities.

Re:Something would get in the way.

[andy@petdance.com]

Not ego at all. As noted in the article, Allison stepped aside so that she could concentrate on Perl 6 and Parrot development.

Re:Perl's place in todays world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi:

Just a comment on perl and threads - what (functionally) would a perl script need in terms of thread-like multitasking/parallel tasking that the astonishing POE doesn't provide ?

Actually, tangent to the comment - why doesn't POE get the props it deserves as an AFAIK perl-unique resource ? Most casual perl users don't seem to even know it exists and what it doesn/can do ?

http://poe.perl.org/?What_POE_Is

Thanks -

Re:Ruby and Python "Power", and the Parrot joke

[publius_ovidius]

Dead in the water? Parrot is being actively developed, has part of its development being funded by NLNet, and has made great strides in showing the power of a register-based virtual machine vis-a-vis a stack-based virtual machine. Further, instead of just being a "Perl only" sort of thing, tons of developers in many languages have become excited about what Parrot can do for them and we have active developers coming in from other languages to help out given how excited they are about this. Of course, as the Parrot grant manager (er, this is a new role for me and one that most don't know about), I perhaps see this more than most but you're welcome to sign up on the development lists and see for yourself rather than just take my word for it.

Of course, if you have any substance to back up your "mental masturbation" comments, feel free to share it. I'm sure there are many developers who would be curious to know why they're wasting their time.

Guile

[SimHacker]

The Gnu kernel is being actively developed, and has bla bla bla...

Why aren't you just extending Guile, which has been declared the official GNU scripting langauge by none other than RMS himself.

Tom Lord discusses the history of Guile, in the context of the great TCL war, which happened just before Java came onto the scene.

Ian Bicking discusses some of the reasons why Guile failed to gain any traction.

-Don

Re:Guile

[publius_ovidius]

If you read through your post, you see that you talked about Guile a few times and gave no indication that in clicking a link apparently about Guile that I might, just might, have gleaned a bit of insight about why you object to Parrot. If you have bothered to say up front "hey, this has info relevant to my Parrot objections", I would have clicked the link.

Of course, the main points of that link were lack of developer effort (Parrot has tons of devopers compared to Guile though I confess we don't have enough) and the issue of string handling in different languages (a problem that Parrot addressed a long time ago). There's a claim that a CLR will force languages to adopt a common set of semantics. That claim is false. If you pay attention to current Parrot development, you'd know that. Or if you just asked instead of assumed, you'd know that.

If you have anything current to say, we're all ears. Post it to the development lists, though. I really don't want to bother arguing with someone who is attacking a project they clearly have little knowledge of.