Continuing your thought about “doing too little on the other parts of programming” – I partially agree here – but only partially, because I think every Perl programmer recognizes that the biggest advantage of Perl is CPAN – and CPAN is not just a code repository it is a whole ecosystem. But I do agree that we could use it better. And your article on IDEs is really dead on.

I don’t know much about Oz except what I just skimmed of Wikipedia, but to me it seems very focussed on language (though interesting) and little else (cpan-like libraries, a special IDE, debugging tools, community, forums, learning resources and so on). Exactly what I tried to criticise earlier, that language development is far too focused on writing new code and far too little on the other parts of programming – which is taking a lot more time and effort than writing new code. (That is not a criticism of Perl only of course, it’s just that I happen to spend most my time with Perl)

Also, a new language must meet a need to succeed too – there are plenty of really nice languages out there, but the majority of developers are not going to go through the relatively large effort of learning them unless it offers them clear value back. Being better from a computer science point of view is not enough (as proven many times).

That said, I don’t think freshening up some of the old Perl sites would hurt.

If it’s one thing I learned from my experience with the Oz programming language, it was that this statement is false.

However, something that would really implement some of the ideas from my previous post would probably be exciting and a real step forward – although maybe only for me..

And what’s “a programming ecosystem that makes you go ‘wow’?”