Is this a dream or a nightmare? (Was Re: XML)

[David T. Grove]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2000 15:09:29 -0600, "Frank Sergeant"
<frank at canyon-medical.com> wrote:

>
>"David T. Grove" <pete at petes-place.com> wrote in message
>news:39def2ae.8929692 at news.davesworld.net...
>
>David, I enjoyed your rant about ActiveState in this post and in the
>interview with "Pete" on the www.CodeMagicCD.com web site.  It had always
>annoyed me that ActiveState allowed one to download only a
>non-redistributable "distribution" of Perl.  I feared (and I believe it has
>been realized) they would take Python in the same direction.

Don't just fear it. I've been fighting these bastards for more than
two years now. I know what their goals are, and how they get there. If
this community shows any acceptance of them, you can kiss python
goodbye within five years. Pick up a copy of the camel and you'll see
what I mean (third edition)... every other page is another feature
that's partially implemented. The only reason that's been publicly
visible for the horrendously early release of Perl 5.6 by Sarathy was
for ActiveState to meet the Microsoft crossplatform toolkit
deadline... and since they own Sarathy, they can control such
things... and put out a perl that's about half finished just to
impress their Redmond masters. But then, without Redmond, ActiveState
doesn't really have the wherewithall to pay their electricity bills...

I do wish people would stop saving them from bankruptcy.

When I heard that ActiveState was going Python, I was furious at Guido
for allowing it. He's so GPL/OSS that he flogged me until he found out
that CodeMagic was free. (I just won't distribute source except to
developers helping with the project, because there are theieves in
them there perl woods.) I'm starting to see that Guido didn't "allow"
it at all... or that's the impression I'm getting from posts like
this.

>I noticed on the web site that you said
>
>> The true beauty of perl is shown in how rapidly a program can be created:
>> a good average for comparison is 1 line of perl for every 25 lines of C,
>> TclTk, Python, or Visual Basic, and every 100 lines of C++.
>
>I was surprised to see that ratio of 1 to 25 for Perl to Python.  Could you
>say a little about your reasoning in that regard?

Did that in a later post in this thread. First rude pythonista I've
found so far. Well, second. (Is "pythonista" politically correct? I
don't know the right word. In Perl it would be "japh".)

>
>Is your PerlMagic port of Perl freely redistributable?

Of course. That's the whole point of it. The problem is, anyone who
mentions it on the Win32-Perl mailing lists (controlled by guess-who)
gets banned. (Pretty easy to control markets if you control the
media.)

It's shortly to be renamed "FreePerl" unless the trademark on Perl
gets put into place, in which even I'd probably do something like
FreePL. It's just a distribution without the ActiveState crap in it
that disables standard embedding and extending. It's not a port, just
a build with most of the most popular modules built in. I'm trying to
take it even a step farther and bring it to GCC, but several of the
modules aren't ready for anything but MSVC. Even the Borland compile
has stagnated for over two years.

Problem is, nowadays, they've bought up so many of the P5P, they're
hoarding modules until months after they release them in ActivePerl,
to prevent competition (me) from showing the world that one person can
keep up with their whole team. It took me over three months to get a
libwin32 that was usable with Perl 5.6, when AS had it the day of the
5.6 announcement. "No, we don't change any modules." Pffft, yeah,
right.

Anyway, let's get off that subject. I have another issue or two that I
need some help with. I need to determine the future of CodeMagic
itself. Just a quick question before I bring it up... how many of you
actually use it?