Hi Toby,

I agree that it's somewhat concerning, but at the same time I am reminded that Perl has already gone through this at least once or twice before. Many or most of the heavy hitters that were developing the key Perl modules at the time I began using it (c. autumn 1995) had departed or mostly withdrawn by about 10 years after that, including early pioneers like Graham Barr, early web architects like Doug MacEachern, Stas Beckman et al., application architects like Andy Wardley ... bah, it's useless to try to make a list.

Then the Renaissance began and modern Perl evolved, with a slew of new utils and tools, many of the ::Tiny family, and the world was saved. Some people wrote incredible new packages, including, notably for my own mid-career can-I-still-make-it-as-a-Perl-dev? period, you, Adam Kennedy, David Golden, Rik Signes, Ribasushi, Matt Trout and the Moo[se] developers. But the older packages that were still relevant continued to mostly work and also be updated where needed. That's one thing about some of the contributions, e.g. Template Toolkit : they are just *complete*. The same thing is true about many of the packages released during the Renaissance.

So I think one consideration is that many of the tools that are needed already exist, so there is probably less room for innovation than in years (decades!) past. But as you said, the older tools are almost always well-maintained by a newer generation of devs/maintainers. The latest wave of async processing tools and modern app frameworks will no doubt undergo the same evolution. I have confidence in the future. After all, as you know, there's nothing as fun as when you get on a good roll developing in Perl!

What I do want to highlight is the extreme scarcity of developers *in general* who can contribute in the way the "heavy hitters" do. I've made a few contributions to existing packages over the years, and released a couple of minor ones myself, but all the big ideas I've had are still mostly ideas, and I am clear-eyed about how difficult it is to make something that is widely useful. Even with *today's* development and release tools, the level of commitment, drive, raw intelligence, big-picture thinking, time investment, discipline and sheer force of will necessary to conceive of and then execute and deliver a universally useful and stable package or toolkit is simply not even latently in the vast majority of Perl hackers.

Thanks be that the universe seems to deliver a steady trickle of such extraordinary luminaries. I completely agree with Your_Mother that in general they are under-appreciated and rewarded for their contributions and sacrifices.