shar 3.49 (part 2 of 2)

[John Macdonald]

In article <15859 at bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:
|In article <1990Sep15.104022.22648 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> xanthian at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
|>
|>  [...]                               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.
|
|Utter bullshit, he said dispassionately.  :-)

While I generally agree with the objections that state that the
situations for perl and shar are not comparable, I think that
Tom (and previously, perhaps to a lesser extent, Randall) have
slightly overstated the objection to the factual portion of Kent's
posting.  When Perl 2.0 came out, it *did* include a large number
of patches.  The release of Perl 3.0 was much neater.

(Otherwise, I agree with Tom and Randall that Kent's rejection of
Perl is foolish, and that the situation does *not* compare with
the current shar if you compare using some sort of metric like
patches per feature.  Even the release combining with a large
number of patches is understandable.  Even way back then, there
was a fairly large well-connected Internet community and variable
delays between sending an item to comp.sources.unix and it being
actually posted.  Perl's attempt to rationalize into a single
interface many features common to many systems (but implented
in many different ways) lead to a number of patches.  So did
people asking for other large capabilities that were often
available in similar, but different, ways on many systems.
Many of those patches were due to its phenominal success *before*
it had even been posted to c.s.u!  It is not suprizing that the
release of Perl 3.0 was tidier.  Most of the obvious new features
has already been added, so new-feature patches are much less
frequent.  So much work has already been done on wide portability
issues that new individual features are more easily added in a
portable manner.  A large enough group of Perl users existed to
allow a much wider group of Beta testers.)
-- 
Algol 60 was an improvment on most           | John Macdonald
of its successors - C.A.R. Hoare             |   jmm at eci386