Ahab Has A Blog.

First, Perl 6 is on the road to going somewhere. They are fixing the substantive criticisms of Perl 5: a syntactically ugly (though eminently flexible) OO system; and general obscurantism (though the latter applies wherever the users of a language will test its capabilities severly, which is to say: wherever things aren't boring). They seem to be ignoring (thankfully) the less substantive critiques: Too Much Freedom, Insignificant WhiteSpace, and Punctuation. I've never understood that last criticism, personally, but it seems to be very popular among the Significant WhiteSpace and B&D OO programming advocates. That these "problems" seem not to matter in practice recalls the (possibly apocryphal) French Academic "joke" (see the Sunday NY Times: we don't need no stinkin blodges) that goes something like "yes, that is true in practice, but the problem is, will it be true in theory?"

Second, the most interesting thing (to us) on this graph is that around day 30, there's an innput of new committers and a temporary flattening of the number of commits. A micro-visible example of Brooks' LawUpdate: Autrijus pointed out I seemed to have the lines reversed. Either that or I was seeing a signal in noise - frankly I can't remember enough to distinguish. Anyway, I can report that Pugs works (and there's even a FreeBSD port), which is cool. I think Perl 6 looks very promising and I'm starting to believe it will happen in time to keep Perl from being slowly overtaken by Python.

Also, Autrijus is apparently Taiwanese. Also interesting, if you know what I'm talking about, which you probably don't.

Also, this pretty much sums up this entire content zone: Warnock applies