I read an article on the O'Reilly site entitled 'Perl is Dead. Long live Perl.'
The article was okay, I read it as an account on the development of Perl, with focus on Perl5 and Perl6 - the article however did get move into a minefield and this became really clear when I got to the comments. I was not surprised, of course the article had sparked a whole lot of responses of differing opinions and I was a saddened by many of the negative comments.
Often it seems as if we will never get out of this tar-pit of comparing editors, languages and the position of curly braces. A lot of energy seem to be wasted on discussing these things over and over again.
It is weird that people cannot embrace the diversity offered via the Internet.
This week I also listened to the Perlcast interview with Ross Turk from SourceForge.
He was asked about Google Code and whether Sourceforge regarded Google as a competitor, he answered no. His reasons for doing so are unclear to me. I have always meant that a little competition was good - I did however interpret his actual response and I think Ross might be of the same opinion.
I also saw the lightning talks from OSCON 2007 with Andy Lester, he spoke highly of Google Code and not so highly of Sourceforge :)
I think people are entitled to an opinion on topics for which they care and on which they have knowledge and/or experience.
I just think it is important to be constructive in your criticism. The article was a good piece and it did not deserve the general negative response it got, even though one might argue that it asked for it :)
I am still a Sourceforge user, but I am considering using Google Code for one of my future projects. So I can see fo myself and I can make up my own opinion on Google Code and Sourceforge.
I am still coding Perl5 and I am not really following the Perl6 development actively, but I am interested in the future of Perl. I would love to learn more languages like Python and Ruby, but I simply cannot find the time to do so.
But I am happy that Perl6 is happening, Ruby happened and Google Code happened. So that Python, Perl 5 and Sourceforge have something to compete against so improvements can be made and things can evolve.
Diversity is in general what we got and we have differing opinions and all this is good and to quote a wise man who once developed a programming language "Be nice".
So I say long live diversity and death to uniformity and lets move on...
