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After 15 years of development, perl 6 will be officially launched as production ready software in 2015.
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/get_ready_to_party/
Who knows, 2015 may also be the year of the linux desktop, unless HURD is also ready for prime time.
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Fortune finishes the great quotations, #2
If at first you don't succeed, think how many people
you've made happy.
(Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 08 2014, @03:25PM
Back in the late 90's I ran a small internal network (less than 20 computers) for students to enter and crunch numbers. Each machine had a bare-bones Slackware install on some old Pentiums (II?), applications were written in Perl, and Perl scripts held it all together. The simplicity of it all was elegant, and I loved it.
Then enter the Slack and Perl communities. It was a 90/10 rule. 90% were decent and a pleasure to interact with online, and 10% were passive-agressive sociopaths. The 10% seemed to rule the roost, so to speak. In a few years I replaced Slack with FreeBSD, and traded the Pentiums for more powerful machines allowing me to replace the Perl applications with Java. What a difference. Most if not all of my memories of the Perl (and Slack) forums are unpleasant, in sharp contrast to the many wonderful exchanges I've had with the FreeBSD and Java communities.
There's more to the story than what's usually mentioned as to why Perl (and Slackware) began to dry up and blow away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 08 2014, @03:49PM
I'm missing something. What does the server host OS and the programming language used by site scripts have to do with the behavior of the online users?
(Score: 1) by dlb on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:54PM
What I was getting at, maybe poorly, is that the online forums can influence users to find a more palatable alternative, and can discourage new comers. As the user-base shrinks, the project (OS, language, or whatever) moves toward irrelevance.
BTW, it wasn't just the online communities. The behavior was exhibited elsewhere. There was a quite unfortunate arrogance of the few that worked against the interest of the many.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 08 2014, @04:05PM
If there were sociopaths among the developers, they were most likely among the 90%. That's exactly why sociopaths are so dangerous: They are not easily recognized as such. They appear to be very friendly and helpful people (and actively maintain that impression), while harming you behind your back. When you find out they work against you, you can bet it's already too late: The damage is already done.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.