cperl is not a religion

The recent perl5 management problems are disturbing

Criticizing the broken perl5 development process, the managers and esp. various technical problems is suddenly explicitly disallowed in the various perl5 forums by citing a new “bad faith” code of conduct rule. Mentioning incompetence of submitters is considered uncivil, and mentioning the marketing lies of the previous “pumpkin” (admin) is also considered uncivil. But lying, abusing the powers, and constant usage and even encouragement of foul language is interestingly not considered uncivil.

cperl was initially created to overcome technical debt created by the current maintainership, who refuse to use a proper development process, refuse to take back wrong technical decisions which are blocking critical progress, and even discussing it. And mostly the complete lack of progress since 2001, but rather a disturbing series of grave technical mistakes and detoriation of the code base.

We favor community-friendly democratic development policies as e.g. in perl6 over the usual old-style dictatorial model. That means the powerful (those with management and commit roles) are not allowed to abuse their powers, while the powerless users are allowed and need to have the abilities to criticise them and their code.

In the old trust-based dictatorial model as e.g. in linux or perl5 the powerful call the not powerful abusive names (“asshole” or “jerk” is very common, or “trolls”), and are allowed to avoid discussions of features or problems by directly committing to master, rejecting tickets or selectively abuse their powers. This is forbidden in cperl.

What want to give a forum to discuss future directions of the perl5 language, merging most of the perl6 features without breaking existing code.

Such a discussion is historically not possible in the perl5 porters list, and now even not in the /r/perl subreddit anymore. Thanksfully cperl managed to overcome most of the stagnation of the last 10 years, within only one year of development. But most of the new features are only 90% finished.

Interesting discussions would be:

  • how to fix p5p
  • how to create a proper development process (hint: see what the others did)
  • details of the new cperl features in development: signatures, type system, inlining, symbol table, hashes, jit (tracing or method), ops, class+method keywords, multi dispatch, native types, builtin ffi, native compiler (unexec), …

Comments on /r/cperl/