Re: [ID 19991229.003] perl 5.005_03 core dumps -- signal

[Steve Fink <sfink@digital-integrity.com>]

It's not that easy. Any significant task will require some complexity.
One of the primary tasks of the designer is to squish the complexity
around, not only trying to reduce the total complexity but also shifting
the complexity to the most painless area. The globally optimal solution
may have more total complexity, if such a thing could be measured,
because the complexity is forced into less harmful areas. In a
client/server situation, typically you want to pile more complexity onto
the server when it saves the clients some trouble, partly because there
are more clients than servers (and each client is implemented
independently), and partly because servers tend to run on beefier
hardware (complexity and performance tend to be inversely correlated.)

I don't think Ilya is enamored of complexity, I just think that he
weights things differently. He'd rather remove odd special cases that
make the perl implementation and documentation more complex, and add
features that allow users to get their jobs done more straightforwardly;
TomC would rather place more of the complexity burden of backwards
compatibility on the perl core and make life simpler for people who know
the existing perl and have written thousands of working scripts. From
either's perspective, the other seems to be a mad lunatic bent on
destroying perl for some strange diabolical and egomaniacal purpose. The
rest of us know they're both right, but that somehow the combination
results in a perl that just gets better and better, and only rarely
worse.

- Your resident anthropologist

If I have offended anyone by the above characterizations, I do most
humbly and deeply apologi... nah, screw it, neither of you knows where I
live.

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References to:

Tom Christiansen <tchrist@chthon.perl.com>

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