Perl patches (was Re: shar 3.49 (part 2 of 2))

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <1990Sep15.104022.22648 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, xanthian at zorch (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
| There is sufficient precedent, John.  Or have you forgotten the initial
| release of Perl, followed instantly by 26-some patches?
| 
| It was along about patch 20 that I realized I would never, for love or
| money, write a line of Perl code, I was that angry at Larry's release
| methods.

Larry released a major revision of a language that runs on nearly
every machine known to man that smells a bit like UNIX.  He could not
possibly test this language on every system that ran it, so he made
his best guesses.  Some of it didn't work.  The early patches fixed
those.  Then, people ask him for "feature X", which he adds,
willingly.  (Try *that* with your favorite vendor.)  Then someone says
"feature X doesn't work under Ultrix 3.2".  So he fixes it, in record
time (try *that* with your favorite vendor!).  Bingo, another patch.
Someone else says "here's how to make it work under MS-DOS".  Bingo,
another patch.

There have really only been about five major subreleases in the *year*
that Perl 3.0 has been out on the market.  It's at patchlevel 28
because of the maximum size of a patch (one of the releases consisted
of around 15 patches!).

So *don't* write in Perl because of your personal prejudice against an
effective method of handling problems and requests.  Your loss.  Not
mine.  I'm quite content with having the power of Perl (even a
constantly improving one) at my fingertips for a little bit of effort
once a month or so.

Just another Perl hacker,
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn at iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon, home of the California Raisins!"=/