In an answer to my last meditation, an O'Reilly employee admitted that O'Reilly is trying to control perl by using the viral GPL. Also, when I critizised the development of perl6, leading members of the perl community admitted that there was no finished spec and that they were still designing it after 8 years of development. There has been no progress and all that is happening is one useless feature after the other is being added. How can you realistically expect perl6 to succeed without planning it out beforehand? You cannot just start and hope that you figure it out along the way, that has never worked for a serious project.

What does all this mean? It is clear that something is wrong and I think O'Reilly is trying to steer perl to make more money for themselves. They don't want you to program effectively, instead they want to create a new version that is so complicated even the designers don't understand it, so they can keep selling more books to everybody caught in their mouse-trap.

I have been a member of perlmonks.com for many years (I am logging in anonymously now because I know some of you are O'Reilly employees or friends of them and may react negitively), so this makes me very sad, but I think we should all move away from this language which is falling under corporate control. Instead, PHP has been gaining ground steadily and is already a better language, and it is real Open Source. So we should help people move to writing PHP instead. For this I propose we add a new section, entitled "PHP", where we can ask the questions on how to change a piece of perl into PHP and talk about building the future this way. Maybe this can be the start of a phpmonks community?

2006-03-03 Retitled by jeffa, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'New Section: PHP'

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