I've come here again to make a suggestion to break up this OOP log jam.
Inspired by this bit of history (Chapter 7 intro) of Cozen's Perl 5 Internals tutorial:
In 1996, someone
* (I think it was Chip. Must check.)
announced a challenge - the first person to write a compiler suite for Perl would win a
laptop. Malcolm Beattie stepped up to the challenge, and won the laptop with his B
suite of modules. Many of these modules have now been brought into the Perl core as
standard modules.
I propose a similar offer be made for "OOP" in Perl. Here's how I envision it going:
- Perl inteligensia lock themselves in a dark, smokey room - not being allowed to leave until they generate a minimalfunperlish "spec" for OOP Perl.
- Said spec is published with the offer that the first person to publish a $WORKING CPAN module implement it (maybe to an agreed upon top level name space like O:: meant for other implementations) will win a laptop.
- Implementation also gets included in Perl core. (this avoids "15th competing standard" problem)
- Continue to encourage others to throw their own implementation under said official namespace or (better) work to improve the first one that is created that works.
Goals:
- make it fun, build some excitement,bring everyone (or most everyone) back together
- focus on a minimal spec mostly unconnected to silly implementation details
- encourage participation and competition from everyone
- make the weight of one's opinion on the matter comensurate with their actual code contributions
- create a spec worthy of perl and all that is loved about it
What do I mean by minimal?
- as simple as possible, but not simpler
- won't prevent future phases or extensions
- doesn't necessarily require much or any internals hacking
- lets us Perl golf and doesn't constrain us to putt-putt
If we can get something like this going at the highest levels, I will be the first one to throw down $50 in escrow. If it succeeds, I'd be happy to throw in more towards buying the winner a laptop.
And not to spoil it with my opinion, but I think whomever is involved in the minimal (and fun and perlish) spec creation should at least do themselves the favor of taking a look at how Qore presents OOP in a very Perl-like language. That's not necessarily an endorsement, I don't think it's perlish or fun enough; but it is one more source of inspiration (yanno that we can steal).
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