::scr Editors. Again.

[Piers Cawley]

celia romaniuk <space@shadowgirl.net> writes:
> If you don't prioritise, the interface becomes crufty and simple tasks
> become difficult to perform. But it is possible to achieve interface
> depth, as Piers discussed in his mail this morning, by seeing the
> interface as something that is structured and, er, deep.
> 
> So, relying on ad hoc feature requests is problematic because your
> chances of prioritising well are slimmer than if you try and consider
> the system, and the needs of its users, as a whole. 
> 
> Some argue that this is the why a lot of Open Source software suffers from
> clunky interfaces and poor usability. Um,I can't find any references right
> now.

I think that this is part of the reason why Perl 6 is taking so long.
There are loads of things that people want to see in there, and there
are loads of things that people sort of thought were self evident and
nobody wrote the RFC. So we get a bunch of RFCs that are, to put it
mildly somewhat incoherent. 

So we rely on Larry. Larry has a deep understanding of what Perl is,
and (from reading the apocalypses and listening to things that Nat,
Damian and Simon have said about the design process) has also taken
the time to read and digest all the RFCs. Which I can only describe as
a herculean task. Even if you don't like the conclusions he reaches,
you have to admire what he's doing.

What we're starting to see now is Larry's synthesis of all those
ideas, and his decisions about how to change Perl (hey, a programming
language is just another user interface, or is that the other way
around...) to take those ideas on board. I'm impressed with every new
apocalypse at the way he seems to be choosing the least possible
subset of changes that grants the most power, and by the way he has
never confused orthogonality with consistency. Yes, an orthogonal
design is usually consistent, but things don't have to be orthogonal
to be consistent...

Hmm... I think I need to go away and write a proper paper on this.
That last paragraph was vaguely incoherent.

-- 
Piers

   "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a language in
    possession of a rich syntax must be in need of a rewrite."
         -- Jane Austen?