Over on www.perl.com, there are several new articles. Simon Cozens writes about programming GNOME applications with Perl, Doug Sheppard's first in a series of articles for beginners, Michel Rodriguez on Perl and XML, and www.perl.com editor Mark-Jason Dominus' latest, a critique of the Perl 6 RFC process (along with Jarkko Hietaniemi's response).
Also up on the site is a transcription of Larry Wall's talk at The Perl Conference 4.0 this past summer.
Fortunately, as pointed out in the article, Larry will likely pull our collective butts out of the fire with a heroic effort - its just disappointing that the RFC process seemed to proceed with this expectation in mind.
If the RFCs were meant to be the "requirement docs" for the Perl 6 project, I'd understand the general disappointment. I never understood these docs to be so important. After all, specs that are never implemented have no life.
The RFCs were a more organized attempt to hear what people wanted in Perl 6. There was no mandate to implement *ANY* RFC. RFC authors are, of course, free to fork Perl or create their own language as needed.
Larry is one the greatest Open Source project managers to date. He has shepherded five iterations of Perl. I'm certain he will do his usual best for 6.0. When Larry finally hangs up his Perl hat, then this community will need to adopt a radically different developement model for any future versions. I hope this RFC process will be helpful to those Larry-less perlers.
