Some fuddy-duddies think that preferring expression over safety is irresponsible. They might be right, but Perl is a language that doesn't have to justify itself:
Young Canadian here. Personally, it's just hard to find work, and there's no cheaper place than mom's house. My girlfriend lives with her parents. She has a job, but her family is having a hard time finding work themselves.
I'm doing it because it's free, and it's a chance to find a job. If I had a steady job, I'd be out in no time. But goings are tough.
I'm saying job a lot. Live in rural Canada and you'll find that job is the magic word. Lots of people do contracting work up here, for welding and scaffolding and that sort of thing. Lots of people have known the experience of working for a month and never seeing the paycheck as the company goes under.
There's a lot of fuss about the Cite C dam in British Columbia. I think it will be built, no matter the problems, because it means work for the people building it, and those people are people I know. Jobs jobs jobs.
I know this isn't about Canada, and I didn't even read the paywalled article, but I think we're staying home because the economy sucks and there are no jobs.
I've lived at home and I've lived on my own and I'd rather live at home even if the cost was the same. Going home to an empty apartment or roommates that don't care about you is lonely af.
Basically, it's to make all OpenBSD developers participate in the release process. There's no dev and stable team - everyone is in the same tree, makes breaking changes early, spends months stabilizing. CVS helps force developers to participate, because branches can't exist for long before the resulting merge is too painful to be worth it.
Although, they are careful to say that, just because it works for them, doesn't mean it will work for you. As well, your other points are still valid. (My personal gripe is that CVS over the net is so slow that I have to use an external tool like CVSync.)
It's pretty simple - freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. That includes in a proprietary environment. That includes whatever you want it to include. The other three freedoms then tell you "except in some ways we personally don't like."
They also don't like the FSF much. They have done some things that are a little controversial, like require devs to cede ownership of code so that the FSF can relicense when they want to (mostly to new versions of the GPL).
That's a misrepresentation of what the OpenBSD people were getting at. They had a dispute with Richard Stallman over his deciding to not endorse OpenBSD. That does not mean that they don't like free software. Tellingly, the ports tree has an abundance of free softwares. The idea that they don't like free softwares is disproven by the very thing that they and Stallman had the dispute over.
What are you talking about? You can use the software however you wish. Even "in a proprietary environment" (like you can run LibreOffice in Windows).
What you mean is probably copyleft licensing which is only a subset of free software licenses. Copyleft means that you cannot redistribute the software and its derivatives unless you give the freedoms down the road to your clients/users as well.
However, there are free software licenses that aren't copyleft too.
Obsolete is a funny word to use. In this case, it would mean that Python 2 is in good working order, but is no longer wanted. That's bound for a flame war, because:
- There is a community that wants it (largely enterprise).
- The Python team does not want it.
A less controversial word is deprecated - the Python team is discouraging use of Python 2, but not prohibiting it's use or development. That's fair, and if you read this page:
they are not very opinionated about it, largely saying "Use 3, unless you can't, then use 2 and start trying to migrate, unless you can't, then just use 2."
I will say, not to give somebody a bad day but, 2.8 seems like a bad idea. Currently python's development has still largely been a straight line, which is good for transitioning, but 2.8 would cause a fork. It would give a lot of people a short-term win for a long-term lose. Better not to tempt people.
Obsolete was a wrong word to use, I admit that. But from an integrator's perspective supporting both versions is a mess. The problem is that the interpreter has the same name (python), the libraries export the same symbols (well, same names, different signatures for extra fun) etc.
Like you said, Python team sees the 3.x series as the successor AND as a replacement for Python 2.x. They were never meant to exist one beside the other (or, there was no thought put into this before the release).
From my perspective, giving people the choice between 2 or 3 will only give us problems down the road, which is why I vehemently discourage it.
I wonder what about this made this difficult. Was it because it's a language interpreter? Libraries have this problem sometimes, but not as much. (I never hear of issues with gstreamer between 0.10 and 1.0, for example.) Maybe it was just that a binary called python existed? Maybe we should have just said "screw it, python means python2, end of story."
Well, in my ideal world maintainers would have put all possible effort to porting libraries to python 3 and put python 2 versions into legacy mode (e.g.: security updates, fork it if you want to continue on the 2-branch).
In my field what seemed to keep people on python 2 for a long time was numpy or scipy (or both, I do not remember which) which did not get a 3 upgrade for a long time.
Either that, or just call it something different, kind of like perl6. There is no perl6 distribution shipping a perl library or some perl.dll that clashes with perl5.
I think this is a good idea. I realize that, you know, freedom of speech and all, but this is called HACKER NEWS.
I would personally like it best if the political news just lessened overall, rather than stopping entirely for a week, but what can you do. Can't just tell people "actually, the political thermometer is at 25°C, gotta let it cool down to 21°C."
This post is way too angry. The problem it describes is legitimate, but still just a problem to be fixed.
Having the language maintainer need to bless packages with native bindings is strange, though. Tag the packages so that people know they use native bindings, then people can decide whether or not to trust them. You cannot build an ecosystem through one person.
A master programmer passed a novice programmer one day. The master noted the novice's preoccupation with a hand-held computer game. "Excuse me," he said, "may I examine it?"
The novice bolted to attention and handed the device to the master. "I see that the device claims to have three levels of play: Easy, Medium, and Hard," said the master. "Yet every such device has another level of play, where the device seeks not to conquer the human, nor to be conquered by the human."
"Pray, great master," implored the novice, "how does one find this mysterious setting?"
The master dropped the device to the ground and crushed it underfoot. And suddenly the novice was enlightened.
I've played video games since before I could walk. Some games I connect with and can't stop playing - Undertale and Papers Please come to mind. Most don't anymore, not even an old favorite like Doom.
I feel like there's something to this article, but I think it's larger than "I don't like Game of Thrones". There is room for games that really dig into humanity, rather than being meaningless mechanics.
It is indeed good! (I actually have the soundtrack on my phone.) But I suggest playing the game and letting the soundtrack surprise you. It really is worth a play.
Yeah, I usually avoid listening to the soundtrack before playing some game, but I've heard Bonetrousle somewhere, and couldn't resist buying the whole OST on Bandcamp :)
The game sounds somewhat controversial with some liking it a lot, while others quite disliking it. I might give it a try at one point.
I really liked it! Then again, I played the games it was (obviously) inspired by, and I liked those games too. I understand if people don't like it - it's pretty personal, in the way that it's targeted directly towards the niche the creators love. Those things tend to be rather splitting, so it's unsurprising, in retrospect.
It's kind of like bad shark movies - there is a group of people who love them, and everyone else is fine not being in that group. It's not that either group is better or worse, it's just a niche.
Maturity: Perl 6 was released a little under a year ago. That's not long, and the leading implementation has not yet caught up with the standard (though work is ongoing). The ecosystem isn't quite there yet either.
Examples: People can be really bad at imagining value in the right things - they need to see it. There hasn't been a very compelling killer app yet.
Perception: People conflate Perl 6 with Perl 5. (Reasonably!) Most people remember TIMTOWTDI and remember that it was a bad thing, or at least that they prefer the Zen of Python. Most of all, they remember trying to read bad code. I don't think that Perl encourages bad code, but it sat in spaces that had lots of bad code already. (Lots of code made by people who are not programmers.) There are also codebases in Perl that are very well made, and easy to read. But we are better at remembering bad things.
Again, IMO, Perl 5's biggest problem was the surprising language. I could write something that was legal code, but had different semantic value than I thought, and the language was littered with cases like that. It was common to think that Perl was to complex for any one programmer to know.
Perl 6 isn't like this - the entire language is composed of simple components (at least, simple for their problem domains). It's also littered with good ideas that don't exist in other languages, like their regexen and grammar support. Everything else in the language is still top notch, like unicode handling and concurrency.
Basically, it is the things around the language, not the language itself. I think it is telling that people saying they don't want to use the language are saying "Perl sucks" rather than "I don't like feature X" or "This construct is confusing".
(I remember Eevee saying that "Perl 6 is truly the realization of Perl 5’s mission: to be startlingly consistent, and also just plain startling." I think that when people look at Perl 6, they'll be startled. But when they are no longer surprised, they'll just find powerful consistency.)
Boy, it's fast. I open a document, and it's there in less than a second. Very impressed. Like with Firefox, I'm starting to see the backend work.