
Perl Master Plan - mmoez
http://perlmasterplan.com/
======
cestith
This is not a master plan. This is not The Perl Foundation. This site and
these people do not speak for the Perl community or its core developers.

The whole site is run by Will Braswell, the creator and maintainer of RPerl,
and Reini Urban, the creator and maintainer of CPerl. Both are increasingly
troublesome to the Perl community. Rather than apologizing and reintegrating
to the community, they've decided to start their own separate community where
they are the leaders without disclosing the fact that they are speaking for
this new, separate party.

~~~
mst
Let me confirm this, except more so.

Will and Reini have effectively been cut out of the main line perl community
for repeatedly being assholes to anybody who dared to disagree with them about
anything (and I mean being assholes by _my_ standards, which I hope at least
some readers will recognise as a rather high bar to clear).

When the website was first created there was a ripple across the social media
presences of assorted significant perl/cpan people, myself included, decrying
it, though it's non trivial to search for because most of us deliberately
didn't include the URL to avoid signal boosting its existence any more than
strictly necessary.

The general consensus among my fellow cpan authors (including core team
members of some of the most widely used projects) is basically a superposition
of

1) "Oh for fuck's sake, not them again"

and

2) "The only way this could've been more tone deaf and counter productive is
if instead of a 'master plan' they'd called it a 'final solution'"

There's lots of things happening of late that I'm very optimistic about. This
shit is basically the Tulsi Gabbard of perl futures. I respect the right of
the authors to hold their opinions, but I respect nothing _about_ said
opinions and would encourage everybody else not to feed the trolls.

\-- mst, deeply unimpressed by this shit

~~~
zzzcpan
Comments like this is what makes people not want to participate in your
community. And your peer group is not even the Perl community at large, I
doubt anyone but a small minority even cares about what's going on with
mainline Perl these days, they are not exposed to any of it.

~~~
mst
They've insulted the perl5 maint team. They've insulted the raku developers.
They've insulted every cpan author I've ever seen dare to disagree with them.
They've insulted Larry, to his face, mid conference talk.

("they" to mean "at least one, possibly both, of the two instigators of this
rubbish")

Their behaviour has repeatedly and materially damaged participation in the
community.

I understand that my comment may seem to be coming on a tad strong, but after
several years of trying to get them to participate constructively my patience
is more than a little frayed.

\-- mst

------
smacktoward
This gets it exactly backwards, IMHO. It’s all about what _Perl_ needs: more
Perl jobs, more Perl classes, more Perl apps. But what drives adoption of a
language are the ways that language satisfies what _users_ and _developers_
need.

If you want to drive Perl adoption, don’t tell the world to use Perl, tell the
world about problems that Perl is better than any other language at solving.

~~~
agentultra
Have tried this with Common Lisp and Haskell.

I think the biggest factors in adoption are: being in the right place at the
right time and app/platform exclusivity.

That's a lot harder to overcome these days. I'm starting to doubt if we'll
ever see another popular language displace the status quo.

~~~
setr
I disagree -- software development is more fashion-driven than the fashion
industry itself.

Programming languages are simply interfaces into a particular tech stack. The
stacks will shift as the trends come and go, and the languages will go with
it. Perhaps the lowest levels of the stack have settled nice and snugly, with
little hope for displacement except by extreme measures (cpu archs, kernel/os
implementations, etc) but the higher layers are still rapidly changing, and
dragging along new languages with them.

~~~
rubinelli
That's what the industry looks like among early adopters, but most developers
wait for clear winners to emerge on new niches before they commit.

~~~
setr
I'm not sure that's true -- I think most developers use whatever is
fashionable in their circle at the time, and then the project gets locked into
that tech. In some circles, they're old enough to stabilize: kernel developers
are attuned to C, and will rarely consider anything else regardless of option-
availability, because their entire ecosystem (and by virtue, culture) revolves
around C. C of course was picked in the first place because of the fashion at
the time kernel development got into gear.

That is, kernel devs got into bed with C before it was a "clear winner", and
now they're stuck with it.

Ecosystems that are still developing, layered on top of these older more
stabilized systems, have the freedom of choice, and they certainly make use of
that freedom.

And of course, by nature of a non-stabilized ecosystem, most choices made are
done _before_ a clear winner exists -- because no clear winner exists just
yet. But the choice will stick, unless it was dramatically harmful to the
project.

The older the ecosystem, the less viable it is to select anything other than
the clear winner, because the ecosystem is coupled to that clear winner, and
the ecosystem is the fashion.

------
ineedasername
Of course to reverse the trend Perl needs more programmers etc., but Perl for
its own sake isn't really a compelling argument. The question really isn't
"What's required to make Perl a more common language?" The question is, "Why
should anyone choose Perl over another option?"

Certainly there's a "best tool for the job" approach that might suggest Perl
for certain applications, but most of the time developers are saddled with
using a single language for a task. Like choosing a hammer: You'd like to
choose the one best suited for a job, but that job requires driving both 20d
framing nails and brads and everything in between. Carrying an 18oz for the
framing, a 10oz for the brads etc. isn't practical, so you choose the 18oz
because it's the only one that will work for framing and you can still use the
18oz for the brads, you just need to use a light touch and be more careful.

All that said, I take it this article may not be entirely serious. If it had
not been written by Larry Wall, I might take it as complete satire, as
examples of the exact wrong reasons to champion a language.

~~~
clscott
To be clear, this was NOT written by Larry Wall. It was written by Will "the
Chill" Braswell, author of a perl fork called `RPerl.`

He is not speaking for the general Perl community

~~~
ineedasername
Thanks for clarifying. The presentation is a bit misleading then-- it has
Larry's picture & name at the top, looking like a byline, and I don't see any
other obvious author except at the very bottoms where two people are listed as
"endorsements"

~~~
lizmat
Will Brasswell has a long history of appropriating other peoples images /
volunteering other people, even to the point of submitting talk proposals for
people at conferences _without_ their knowledge or consent.

I've asked him to remove all mentions of Raku on his site (as Raku is no
longer part of the Perl future), but he has refused to do so.

It's [http://perl11.org](http://perl11.org) all over again, but with improved
graphics and UI. But it's still the same sour wine.

------
stone-monkey
A lot of people shitting on the website in this thread, but it seems to me
like you guys are missing the point - this isn't a site targeted towards
people who aren't using it currently - it's a site targeting the true
believers to give them more concrete actions they can take to help spread the
faith.

~~~
pimmen
If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a language
useful to the problems developers face today, the site deserves the criticism.

~~~
chrisseaton
> If it contributes nothing to the discussion of actually making Perl a
> language useful to the problems developers face today

It does - for example it talks about a project to make Perl faster.

~~~
oefrha
> a project to make Perl faster.

That’s respectable and worthwhile regardless, but I don’t think performance
was a major factor in Perl’s decline. If I start a project right now in Python
instead of Perl, it will have absolutely nothing to do with Perl not being
fast enough. That is to say, I doubt performance improvements of Perl 5 will
help much in regaining ground.

------
leibnitz27
Aside from all the other excellent points about the motivations behind this
group - this one sentence on the website is really a very silly move :
'Currently, most software courses teach either Python or (worse yet) Java'.

If you're trying to show that a language is good, don't slag off other
languages just for the sake of it.

At best it makes unjustified suppositions. At worst it makes you look like a
bitter zealot.

~~~
dehrmann
Except PHP. Hating on PHP is practically a meme at this point.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Sure, but PHP's got it's shit together lately. It's actually grown w/ the
times and isn't the POS it was a decade ago w/ the 4/5 versions. 7 and soon
version 8 are a lot faster, more secure, and w/ composer/laravel and the
ecosystem a lot easier to build apps in. That said it's not always perfect.
There's definitely something to be said of building the entire stack in JS
simply because then devs only need know JS... Or use something like elixir
because of performance needs.

I think hating on PERL is more of a meme than hating on PHP, and in some
circles hating on JS is just as popular a meme... I mean JS is a nightmare
sometimes esp. the tooling/build setups but it accomplishes things not many
other languages can. Though rust+web assembly might be interesting way to skip
js, but learning curve is a bit high on rust.

------
cutler
On my Macbook Pro parsing a 19Mb log file with a regex using the latest Perl 6
(Rakudo 2019.3) takes 8.3 times as long as Perl 5 and 5.1 times as long as
Ruby 2.7, excluding startup time. Text processing is what made Perl famous so
I can't see Perl 6 having a cat-in-hell's chance until performance improves
significantly.

~~~
smhenderson
These guys are using mostly Perl 5 though. They basically forked 5 years ago
and call it Perl 11. They have a good relationship with Perl 6
devs/maintainers and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11
comes from 5+6=11). AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the
name Raku and drop the link to 6 and let Perl 5 continue as it was with new
development instead of Perl becoming a completely new language.

Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone
who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind
of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new,
different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5.

I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.

~~~
mst
> They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers

This is outright untrue, the raku devs can't stand them any more than the rest
of the perl community can.

> AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku

Will and Reini have contributed absolutely nothing to this effort except to
periodically distract the people doing the actual work while we go clean up
after their bullshit and drama.

> I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now
> Perl 6 becomes a new, different language

The raku change is indeed an excellent thing. However this giant pile of
idiocy is trying to capitalise on that change to push their hostile fork of
perl, and that's, uh, let's say "not such an excellent thing."

~~~
smhenderson
Hey thanks for correcting me. I was unaware of a lot of what's going on behind
the scenes. As mentioned I was a heavy user of Perl 5 for a long time and I'll
still find any excuse to use it given a problem I think it will be good at
solving.

I'll have to read up on all of this before I say more but I do appreciate you
giving me something to follow up on and learn about before I open my big mouth
again!

~~~
mst
's all cool, dude, countering their spin while minimally signal boosting it is
why I'm commenting in this thread.

Have a skim through chromatic's Modern Perl when you're bored and see if it
gives you ideas :)

~~~
smhenderson
I actually have read parts of it. My work stopped subscribing to O'Reilly's
Safari Online Library so I lost access to it, kind of forgot about it but
thanks for the reminder, I might just grab a copy today.

And thanks for the kind reply, there's nothing I hate more than speaking
incorrectly or out of turn on HN!

~~~
hercynium
Buy here or read online for free. This is the official website of the book:
[http://modernperlbooks.com/](http://modernperlbooks.com/) (hint - it's worth
buying :)

------
totalperspectiv
Here is a link to the discussion on Reddit a while back:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_maste...](https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/dq1lzy/the_perl_masterplan/)

It's worth reading. What I think it is is a power / money grab by a small
group inside Perl. It's not reflective of the goals or desires of the wider
Perl community. Or at least those goals and desires would not be presented in
this way.

------
Saad_M
The real question is whether a programming language that has lost traction,
mindshare, and focus ever gained it back? It's probably no coincidence that
Python's rise was at the same time of Perl's stagnation.

~~~
chrisseaton
I think what happened to Perl is that its approach (puns, whimsy, ornate
symbols, multiple ways to do the same thing) suddenly became extremely
unfashionable with the rise in popularity of more clean and simple languages
like Python and Ruby (although Ruby had a much more whimsical US community in
the past, it's not part of the core language community in the same way.)

Almost overnight everything about Perl seemed very old fashioned. Maybe their
style of programming will suddenly become popular again? But doesn't look like
it's coming soon.

~~~
brnt
I don't think those things became unfashionable, it was just not what people
who were until then (late 90ies) not programmers were looking for. They were
looking to get shit done (tm) and verbosity (Java) or clarity (Python) suited
what they were looking for much better than Perl (a clever language for clever
programmers).

~~~
s_kilk
I think that's a large part of it, yes, but a lot of folks saw the demented
weirdness of perl and were (rightfully) turned off. And by that time there
were sane alternatives available.

------
djhaskin987
This was always the problem of Perl: it tried to be all things to all people:

> * Perl as the fastest language > * Perl as the most popular language

You can't get the fastest language (assembly) and be the cognitively easiest
and most popular language (Python), there's a trade-off there.

This is why Python won: it focused on what was most important for ease of
maintainability and readability and left out everything else

~~~
twunde
Honestly python won in large part because perl took over a decade to come out
with perl 6. Knowing that there was a backwards-incompatible upgrade on the
horizon shortly and having that be true for a decade meant that new projects
in perl or major upgrades in perl were delayed and then shifted to projects in
other languages. Python and ruby both were beneficiaries of this (especially
with PHP going through a similar process with PHP 6 which took 5 years before
being abandoned.)

~~~
sblom
Cough. Python 3. Cough.

(I don't dispute the majority of your point, but I don't think all 10 year,
backwards-incompatible upgrades are created equal.)

~~~
twunde
Agreed. The main difference is that development of python 3 didn't stop
development on the 2.x branch until 3.4(?) was out. There was also an upgrade
path and the ability to support both Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time.
Python 3 could _easily_ have been a similar roadblock but was handled well
enough to avoid that fate (better upgrade tooling would have been a massive
help)

------
7thaccount
There was a discussion on this a week ago in the Perl subreddit where some key
community members (Ex: Ovid) chime in.

I think it is a good plan to make Perl faster, but I'd rather they pitch in
and help Johnathan Worthington with the Perl6 (now Raku) effort. Perl5 is a
good language, but there isn't enough to get me to switch from Python. Raku on
the other hand is very cool and I can see the benefit.

Edit:

Perl6 (now Raku) isn't just a version change from Perl5, but is an entirely
new and powerful language. It seems to have pulled some of the best aspects of
Python, Ruby, Perl, and some things from Haskell/Lisp.

------
robviren
I cannot tell if this is satire or not.

~~~
kdmccormick
As with many things Perl, it's tounge-in-cheek.

Yes, they want to increase Perl adoption. No, they probably don't think they
can realistically meet all those goals in the forseeable future.

------
jhfdbkofdcho
I love Perl, but this is delusional

~~~
lizmat
Indeed. Especially when you realize this is only the first of many sites Will
Brasswell wants _other_ people to make:

perlpackages.com perlcontainers.com perlvm.com perlclouds.com
perlaccessibility.com perlinstall.com perlgames.com perloffice.com
perlapps.com perlservers.com perlgrandchallenges.com perlhackathons.com
spacescouting.org perlscouts.com certifiedyouthprogrammer.com
programmingmeritbadge.com mlperl.com scienceperl.com perldemos.com
perljobs.work perllegacy.com perlpodcasts.com perlvideos.com perlbrochures.com
perlflyers.com perlmerchandise.com perlpapers.com perlnewsroom.com
perlblogs.com perlinfographics.com perlbeer.com perlparties.com
perlconferences.com perlmulticore.com perlsupercomputers.com perlspeed.com
perlfamily.org

------
Jenz
This is the first time I’ve ever read anything which left me thinking ‘it
_may_ be satire’ ...

Be it satire or not (which I think it actually isn’t), this is not a good
sign.

------
zelly
If you want your language to win, all you need is Google to adopt it in one of
their products. Apparently that's all that matters.

------
deftturtle
Never written a line of perl in my life, but this seems like total satire.
They talk about “machine learning” trends and apps and putting classes in
“every school.” It’s exaggerated and funny. Check out their linked site, “Teen
Perl,” which has nothing but a splash page.

[http://teenperl.com/](http://teenperl.com/)

------
eb0la
Perl is #1 in Advent (perladvent.org).

I've been following Perl Advent for a looong time. The sad art is I don't code
Perl anymore (at least 10-12 years) but I still visit perl advent every year.

Let's see what happens this year :-)

------
zzzcpan
_> We are now developing the RPerl compiler, which provides startup
optimization, serial runtime optimization, automatic parallelization, and
memory usage minimization._

What would a modern high performance language look like though? I see it at as
a language with AOT compilation, high performance implementation of a decent
actor concurrency model not shared memory one, vector/matrix abstractions,
primitives and operations. At the same time I see automatic parallelization in
multi core context as something only hurting high performance.

~~~
chrisseaton
> automatic parallelization in multi core context as something only hurting
> high performance

Automatic parallelization hurts high performance? What do you mean - things
like throttling when extremely high-end vector instructions are used?

~~~
zzzcpan
No, I mean more generally performance and efficiency of multi core
computational models are tightly bound to algorithms and so auto
parallelization can only add restrictions on what algorithms can be
implemented and what performance can be achieved. Basically the same problem
many languages have that try to use more cores, instead of pursuing higher
performance, and of course end up slow.

------
orf
> The certificate is only valid for the following names: packages.rperl.org,
> phpmyadmin.cloud-web0.autoparallel.com

I hope step 1 is to get a working TLS certificate.

Edit: Oh, I see. https serves the wrong site...

------
spicyramen
I started using Perl back in 2007 for their text parsing capabilities, then
moved to Python as more and more examples and libraries became available, I
definitely enjoy both.

------
mhd
This is from the Perl11 guys, right? So, not exactly the Perl mainstream, if
such a thing exists these days.

(Not saying that they're entirely wrong)

------
gshdg
What might put Perl back on top (or at least no longer at the bottom) would be
a really awesome modern web application framework.

~~~
rubinelli
Dancer is actually really nice, but that ship has sailed.

------
cafard
"In the past, Perl applications could be found on most computers."

I'm not sure I could fill a bus if I located every programmer in my area who
ever used Perl on a PC. But as someone points out the tone of the page appears
to be tongue-in-cheek.

On the other hand, I think "(worse yet) Java" would make a great .sig line.

~~~
alecmg
Have used Parl at its height.

After studying Java and C courses Per felt like a language I can finally do
something useful without boilerplate. And for simple text processing it was
fast enough.

But then codebase grew... Switched to Python and never looked back past 15
years.

Please let Perl die

------
dotdi
Is this satire?

~~~
efa
I'm not sure. The external links (ex:
[http://teenperl.com](http://teenperl.com),
[http://perlscouts.com](http://perlscouts.com)) are not real sites. If it's
real, its very sad. Hard to get fired up and believe Perl can be relevant in
the modern world via a ridiculous website that looks like a bad amateur job.

~~~
lizmat
Amateur job is the right description. No, alas, it is _not_ satire, far from
it. :-(

------
skzo
First Step: get TLS certificate

~~~
julienfr112
lol. No excuse, you can even do that in perl :
[https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE](https://metacpan.org/pod/Crypt::LE)

------
a3n
Godspeed.

But for one of the goals, Python just seems more immediately accessible to
"non-programmer" technical people for whom programming is merely a means to a
non-programming end.

I used to use Perl decades ago. I can barely read it anymore.

------
theonemind
[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-
serious.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html)

------
sli
I am really confused. Are we taking this obvious joke as though it's a serious
website making serious claims? Everyone seems to be discussing this as though
it's actually real and not a joke.

------
throwanem
This is a great bit!

This _is_ a _bit_ , right?

------
rchaves
why? It's never explained why

------
martythemaniak
This is great. But what is it?

~~~
cestith
TL;DR: this is the manifesto of a self-selected maintainer of a largely
incompatible fork who has growing delusions of usefulness.

This is a splitter's manifesto of what he's going to do right where he blames
everyone else for shortcomings he's done little to nothing to help overcome.
He's too egotistical and toxic to get any work merged into the mainline
project, so he has decided to lead from outside the established community and
separate from the established foundation. He's a technically quite competent
developer who can't work well with others. He speaks for himself and claims
broad support and calls his ramblings a master plan, implying that he's a
master planner for the whole community.

Most of his plans don't even involve Perl mainline or Raku. He's pushing his
own RPerl and Reini Urban's CPerl both of which depart from the Perl code
base. He does this while calling others stupid and difficult and repeatedly
violating the CoC of The Perl Foundation online and at several major events
(including repeated harassment over gender, gender identity, sexuality,
physical disabilities, and his perceptions of other people's moral obligations
and shortcomings under his religion).

During the recent Perl6 to Raku rename, when the plan was to create a new
Facebook group for Raku and direct visitors to the Raku group from the Perl 6
group, he unilaterally renamed the Perl 6 group to reflect the name change. So
we had two Raku groups and no group for people to find it by the old name and
be redirected. All the old posts to the Perl 6 group were now in the newly
renamed Raku group. Since a group can only by renamed every so often, the
fresh Raku group was renamed by the founder of the group to be "Perl 6" for
discoverability and aimed at the old, original group now named "Raku" but with
posts predating the name change talking about Perl 6. Rather than apologizing
when the difficulty he caused was pointed out, he claimed nobody would look
under the old name during the transition period and he was doing everyone a
favor with his rash actions since the founder of both groups hadn't rushed
headlong into the same decision.

He also has a history of using images and other assets without permission or
even attribution. He claims t if something isn't watermarked with a copyright
he's in the clear, which is obviously false on its face in any Berne
Convention country.

Then he wonders why he gets disinvited and nobody wants to work with him on
merging his work upstream. So since everyone else isn't playing by his rules,
he has apparently decided to once again apply his own rules to everyone else
and claim to speak for The Perl Foundation and the larger Perl community
despite no mandate at all to do so.

------
smnplk
Haha, didn't read the post, the title alone gave me enough laughs.

