Quotes of the week

I certainly agree that perl6 is at least as much a different language from perl5 as Java is a different language from C. I am appalled at how messed up things have become. Even people who should know better, people whom I explain this all to again and again and again and again, will ever a few weeks' time lapse again into the Successionist Heresy.

They once again start thinking of perl6 succeeding perl5 **NOT** in the way that Java has succeeded C, but rather in the way that Windows 98 succeeded Windows 95 or the Intel 586 processor succeeded the 386. It is intensely aggravating to watch, yet who can blame them? Every technical product they're ever used that comes with an ever-increasing numeric suffix is one that is meant to be "the next" version, one that will soon supplant that old dinosaur.

This is a miserable situation that we're now quagmired in. It is harmful to perl, because it is superlatively misleading.

  Sometimes related to the development of frogr, and sometimes not, I'd
  like to thank here to some people who helped me in a way or another:

- * My girlfriend, who proved to have infinite patience all the time
+ * My wife, who proved to have infinite patience all the time

  * My son, who was born right at the same time I started this project,
    so they're some kind of "brothers" or the like.

Open source is different from a community-driven project. We're light on community, but everything we do ends up in an open source repository. We make the code open source when the first device is ready. We're building a platform, we're not building an app. When you're building a platform, you evolve and improve APIs, and sometimes APIs are deprecated.

When you're dealing with new APIs community processes typically don't work - it's really hard to tell when you're done, and it's hard to tell when it's a release and when it's beta. And developers need an expectation that the APIs they're using are done. If someone were to look at an early release, they could start using APIs that aren't ready and their software might not work with devices.