Journal: The Perl Community: Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden E

I have taught no less than
2000 users to write Perl 5
in a Bay Area community college.

Perl 6 is an exercise in egotism
whose likeness would be Kernighan
and Ritchie suddenly changing the
assignment operator to * and the
ternary operator to #.

Perl 6 fixes what is not broken. I have never had
students who did not understand
that $L[5] gets an array
element and is a scalar
because it is ONE thing.
Same for hash elements.

The idiotic $L[5] in Perl 6
being $L->[5] in Perl 5 is
beyond lunacy. That arrow
means "points at". The
notation $L[5] in no way
signifies a pointer ... as it does in
C or Perl 5 ... the sensible
Perl.

But what is beyond forgiveable
is that Perl 6 has made the
market of new Perl books
nonexistent. This alone
assures Perl's eventual
nonexistence. Why would an
author want to write a Perl
book that is obsolete in some
fuzzy time period.

But, hey, I've only taught a
couple thousand REALLY REALLY
good Perl programmers. What
in hell do I know?? And that's
just the attitude of Conway,
Torkington, and the rest of
the Insufferables who cannot
see simple realities like the
death of the Perl book market.

I'll be retiring from teaching
in a few years so, in a very
real sense, I don't give a
damn what they do. However,
as I tell my classes: "Love
Perl. Hate the Perl community".

Also hate the "any style is
okay" ethos of this dweebish
"community". I enforce strict
style guidelines and employers
have ONLY congratulated me on
the excellence of my Perl
graduates.

A pox on the Perl "community".
Perl 5 is the end of Perl and
the infinite delay of Perl 6
only ensures that Perl books
slowly disappear from Books In
Print.

Great going, nitwits.

Dr. Dysphoria