Perl 6 is never going to make it (yes, I've looked at it recently)

It's understandable why you'd feel that way-- and I think even chromatic is getting exasperated with the project at this point-- but it's worth remembering that "never" is a long time. Open source projects are different from the usual proprietary ones... consider that there was a time when many people had given up on mozilla...

A few years back, Tim Bunce did some talks about: Perl Myths. You might want to take a look at it... in summary: the idea that perl is "dead" (or inactive) is ridiculous by any objective measure: it's mentioned frequently in job ads, there's a lot of activity in CPAN module development, the perl5 developers are hard at work on getting new features working (and old features working better).

In general, I would say that the perl culture continues to be active in stealing ideas from anywhere it can (including perl 6). You like Rails? Well here's Catalyst. You like Rack? Well here's Plack. You think perl objects need improvement? Try Moose. And so on...

You might mention that the 4th Edition of "Programming Perl" is due out this month: Programming Perl. Lately, Tom Christiansen and brian d foy have been doing quite a bit of work investigating perl's support for Unicode. I'm interested to see this book if only to see what they say about it.

No, I say Altavista sucked because I used it a lot, and it frequently didn't return relevant, useful results.

Got it, you and I were just using different internets, that's all. Or maybe I knew how to do boolean searches.

But "gaming" wikipedia may not be the most effective way of getting the attention you want.

It would be nice if the people who were doing it would come to that conclusion.

Noe Valley is above the bum line. Bums don't like to walk uphill. Spend some time in SOMA or near the civic centre and you will see human excrement(ing).

That's right, it never would've occured to me to look around Civic Center. Meanwhile the bozo-from-socal who did a drive by once, that guys an expert.

People who haven't lived in Noe Valley often have an exaggerated idea of how slick it is, by the way. Really it's full of a bunch of people who wish it were slick, and are often surprised to learn they're not actually living in the 'burbs.

Agreed... "Yeah. Who wants clean streets if it means people like you can't keep cars you never use?" But methinks you missed some sarcasm.

bum taking a crap in some bushes

Actuallly, I call "crap" on this. Ranting SF-hating trolls are always going on about people defecating in public, but people like myself who've been around for ten-years plus have never seen it.

(We don't hate people, we just hate you.)

Walking isn't such a big deal because you don't have to go so far

True enough, but there's another effect you're missing, which is that you'd don't mind walking in SF because it's an interesting place to walk. You do a mile without thinking about it, because there's always something that keeps it from being boring.

In comparison, walking a mile when I was living in Pocatello, Idaho was something you'd think twice about it. Nothing much to look at, and kind of boring, except when there were drunken teenagers in cars throwing beer bottles at you, because there's nothing much for them to look at either.

Not to mention the scam of "street cleaning", which seems to require clearing the street of cars once a week yet somehow get cleaned at best twice a year.

In point of fact, every morning in Noe Valley, right after the traffic cops in golf carts writing tickets, you will see the gigantic street sweeping vehicles following along.

There might be some technical fix for this, like smaller robot smart-sweepers that can clean-up under and around parked cars. Myself, the technical fix I like is called "public transit".

My own complaint would be that the parking cops are way too lenient. They're happy if you've gotten your car out of the way of the street sweepers, and don't care at all if you've dumped it on the sidewalk.

That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats.

Ah. So they should re-implement it in perl.

Perl hackers live for problems like that.

So now the problems are with seriously complicated things like doing bidirectional text properly

I would've thought that was more of a problem for the browser developers. Getting the right UTF-8 output shouldn't be that difficult.