YAPC::Europe 2013 “Future Perl”

Week minus 25. Ceasefire

17/02/13 12:40 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

Dear YAPC::Europe 2013 attendees,

First of all, let us thank you for commenting our previous newsletter so actively. This was a nice test for the commenting system we added recently to the site. It also gave us all an opportunity to let the steam off so that more productive discussions and talks appear in the conference. Thank you for your feedback.

Just a reminder: we are inviting everybody who is interested in Perl 6 development to attend the Perl 6 hackathon that will take place on the day before the conference, on Sunday 11 August. Also, we would still like to find a person who will take a responsibility to lead the Perl 5 hackathon and organise an attractive event for those who are interested in the Perl 5 internals.

Perl is a language with 25 years of its history and it is still active and there are a lot of people to whom it is very important to move the language further. We clearly see that in the numerous discussions of the recent days. We only encourage everybody to be polite and respect each other's opinion.

Last week

During the last week we, the organisers of this year's conference, were working with sponsors to be able to make the conference better. We also contacted Larry Wall for the comments on the names and versions.

Perl 7 was one of the bright proposals in the recent discussions and it became a topic of our last week's newsletter. Here is what Larry thinks about this name:

Perl 7 is a complete non-solution. If people have a hard time understanding the relationship of Perl 5 and Perl 6, how can you expect that they would ever understand the relationship of Perl 6 and Perl 7. :)

Another noticeable proposal was made by Matt S. Trout (mst), who suggested to divide the Perl 5 and 6 by renaming the version 5 to Pumpkin Perl. This may help to make a clear distinction between the Perl 6 language, which became a separate language in the Perl language family, and the language now know as Perl 5.

Let us quote Matt here but please follow his posts if you want to learn more.

I want to add a qualifier to the name of perl5 to make it clear that it has its own identity independent of the perl6 project.

I propose as that qualifier 'Pumpkin' since this is the perl release managed by the pumpking, the holder of the patch pumpkin.

We also asked Larry about the Pumpkin Perl and here is his response:

"Pumpkin Perl" doesn't bother me at all, especially since mst asked me if it was okay before he proposed it. :)

He then continues:

However, I think this is all somewhat beside the point. Perl 6 is designed to fix the problems pointed out by the 361 RFCs, and Perl 5, by whatever name, needs to address at least a subset of the same problems, and that is not likely to be easy to get consensus on. Also, I suspect that as soon as Perl 6 achieves speed parity and interoperability with Perl 5, there will be less grumbling all around, since a part of that is driven by a perception of the failure of Perl 6. But when Perl 6 actually does become a better Perl 5, people won't fight it quite so much. That's how it looks from this end, anyway... :)

Keep calm

Let us continue this issue with one more quote. Neil Bowers left a nice comment in one of the discussions about all that stuff.

The biggest problem facing Perl is the lack of a single clear vision for where Perl is going, and a strategy for getting there. And there's no-one (wanting) to provide these things. And the lack of this prompts some people to pitch their vision and strategy (which is where I think Moe is coming from). I briefly hoped that one of the outputs of the perl reunification summit was going to be such a vision, but if it was I didn't see it.

I'd prefer a single unified vision, as I think the greatest success for Perl lies that way.

This is exactly what we as the organises want. We want Perl to be a successful programming language. At least for the next year, until the next YAPC::Europe conference, and pass this hard task to the following organisers :-) We just encourage everybody not to insult each other within a Perl community, to hear each other and not to be too serious when it is easier just to laugh at a problem and go on.

T-shirts

This year the conference is entitled Future Perl. Nobody knows the future but most of us want it to happen in their own way. We don't want any fights and battles. We sure that the bottom line of everybody's opinion is Perl's success.

So, it looks like a wise idea not to wear a uniform this time. We published a prototype of what we are going to propose. The Attendees will be able to choose their own version of the conference T-shirt. Nobody will be offended. You may preview the T-shirt constructor online at act.yapc.eu/ye2013/t-shirt/index.html.

Remember that at the moment there is no budget available for printing the T-shirts, thus to make that possible we need more sponsors and there's no need to fight against the T-shirt design :-)

Carry on

All in all, we are very happy that we have the change to at least stay nearby while such a historical changes happen. Come to the conference so that you can tell the story to your children and grandchildren. We can treat the whole story as another round of collecting RFCs for our future Perl.

In the next newsletter we will return to the things related to the organisational process itself and will talk about accommodation in Kiev and getting the best price for the hotels.