What if Perl had not ever been huge in the way it was in the late 1990s, but had slowly risen from in the last 25 years, to a peak level that we had today? We’d call it a pretty successful minor programming language community and no one would say it’s dead.

Perl advocates should let go of the pain of not having the “good old days” anymore, and be happy that the language and a user base survives.

I once talked with Drizzle founder Brian Aker who told me that Drizzle was still small because it only had about ten thousand users. He was comparing it to MySQL of course, and in his mind MySQL’s ultimate success will always be the yardstick of success for a database project. But, I know plenty of Free Software projects that would be delighted at the idea that ten thousand people used their code! I’d easily bet that there are more than ten thousand people writing new code in Perl every day. Shouldn’t the Perl community be happy with that success?

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html

– Mental Note: “Throw together a new language and name it ‘Perfect’. Then I can use play on words to make bold statements like ‘This language is perfect!’, ‘This language uses perfect syntax’, and ‘Get the software with a perfect language implementation’”
=)

I find the situation Python is in to be very similar to Perl’s, but I note well your observation that the 3.x path really is intended as a continuation of the 2.x path, where Perl 6 turned out to be something other than a continuation of Perl 5. I struggle similarly with trying to decide which way to go with Python, and I have to admit that my experience with Perl has biased me towards the Python 2.x path. I may have to re-examine this someday before long.

Above all: your suggestion of Perl 7 being a release along the Perl 5 path is fantastic! That needs to happen, and it needs to happen soon. Yesterday! I bow to whoever came up with that, they’re much more perceptive than I; it absolutely would help solve the “Perl is dead” conundrum. I hope it happens.

I don’t understand your comment on security, Ubuntu has an ace security team constantly auditing packages, applying security fixes, and tracking security alerts.

It bothers my Spock-ian brain when people take a statement like “I don’t like chocolate ice cream.” as giving them the right to declare “Chocolate ice cream is a universally terrible food, no one likes it.” It’s just not logical. I’m totally cool with someone not liking Unity: it doesn’t suit your sense of taste or style of working or whatever. So, use something else. I highly recommend GNOME3 or KDE for an alternative modern interface. Or, if you prefer something more “classic” Linux, Mint is doing a good job of preserving that style. I even regularly support one user who prefers FVWM on Ubuntu. Diversity is celebrated in Linux.

I was a Mac user starting in 1984, and have long held Apple’s work as the “gold standard” of OS design, even after I switched to Linux for my primary desktop. But Unity today beats Mac OS X, no contest, and only continues to improve. Please show good sportsmanship and respect the work of other teams improving Linux, even if they’re doing it in a different way or with different results than you personally would choose.

I rather wish you Ubuntu devs were about to integrate more sensible things into Ubuntu and its infrastructure around. Why is there still no dependency czar although a blueprint on Launchpad suggests so? Why are there about 100.000 open bugs (all the time)? Why was the auto-close feature not yet implemented into Launchpad. A colleague of mine already addressed the matter with Curtis Hovey in November 2012. What about security? Why would you not implement audit procedures as a part of the ISO testing process by default…?

However… I realize you addressed UEFI and you released a quite stable 12.04 which makes me remember good old hardy days. Further I read “AppArmor” in you post (not often enough however) which feels great! I also salute you for your efforts regarding OpenStack. Since I work for an ISP myself I think such technologies will be the future. So you’re on a better track with that than with unnecessary things like… something with U****.