I've been casually browsing p5p over the last few months. That is, until Schwern pulled me into a thread about tainting earlier this week.
It turns out that there were some fruitful discussions that came out about taint mode just over a year ago on perl6-language. It started out innocously enough with a request to fix the behavior that produces the error "too late for -T at ..." when running a tainted script as perl foo.pl without the -T specified on the command line.
An idea came up recently on p5p, namely a request to have a lexically scoped "no taint;" pragma, which makes no sense whatsoever on so many levels (but kinda appealing in one or two cases, perhaps...).
That discussion reminded me of one of the reasons why we started Perl6 in the first place. The people who care about Perl as a language are a pretty bright group of individuals. Some of them even maintain Perl in some way, shape or form. But for every person who applies patches, there are about 10 that have new ideas about the language, or rediscover old ideas about the language. Occasionally, some of those ideas are quite inciteful -- like Inline. Other times, those ideas are simply tedious rehashings of ill-informed discussions -- like discarding POD in favor of XML because XML is sexier.
Where does Perl6 fit into this mix? It has created a release valve on the process. The patchers and maintainers can more easily put a stop on pointless discussions, and the dreamers and non-patching thinkers can continue without interfering.
That's not to say that the process is smooth and well-oiled, just an improvement on what has come before. The good news is that absent Perl6, a lot of interesting ideas are finding their way into Perl5, through the use of source filters, compiler backends and debugger interfaces.
