Re: A place to discuss Perl language design questions

* Paul "LeoNerd" Evans <[email protected]> [2026-03-19 16:10]:
> I am looking for a place to hold discussions about various language
> design issues I keep thinking up, relating to all sorts of things.
>
> I'm 99% sure that this mailing list isn't really the place. Mostly
> because most of the people who would have interesting ideas and
> use-cases and actual "I run real Perl code in production systems"
> experience are not here.

Once upon a time, this list *would* have been that place, and in fact
*was* that place. It no longer looks anything like that because so many
people left – and I think not because another venue drew them away, but
because many of them moved on from Perl altogether. If so then there is
no getting that level of discussion back, irrespective of venue.

Maybe I’m wrong and a sizeable crowd of those right sorts of folks still
exists somewhere though, I don’t know.

> Does anyone have any suggestions on a better place?
>
> I don't know for sure whether such a place even exists, yet.. So if not
> it might become more of a question about where we should create it, and
> ensure the right sorts of folks are there.

If my above assumption is correct, then a venue narrowly focussed on
just feature ideas for Perl, while excluding the development of the
interpreter, will be so niche that it is never going to gain any sort
of traction, by itself – the lack of response would be even worse there
than elsewhere.


* Christian Walde <[email protected]> [2026-03-19 16:44]:
> Even tho the moderators there have a tenuous relationship with
> reality, i think the perl subreddit is the closest match to how
> i read your description.

As far as audience, I agree. But much like others I’m not super keen on
Reddit as the primary venue for this. Though its command of the audience
means posting links to the actual venue in r/perl is probably the only
way to attract the kind of traffic that I think Paul is looking for.

> Alternatively you could also set up a special-purpose subreddit and
> then advertise that on the main perl reddit, perl blogs, perlmonks,
> here, etc.

For reasons given above I feel that would not end up with any traffic.
Paul’s ongoing lament is the lack of feedback or reaction to his ideas
or even testable prototypes.


* Philippe Bruhat (BooK) <[email protected]> [2026-03-19 17:01]:
> And a lot of language activity already happens on GitHub. Maybe the
> issues of https://github.com/perl/PPCs are not a terrible place for
> such conversations? After all, PPCs are about the evolution of the
> language.

In terms of “where does this sort of discussion belong”, I agree. But by
itself, I think it will leave Paul as frustrated about the amount of
feedback as ever.

> You could always link to the PPCs issue conversation from any forum
> (reddit, blogs.perl.org, etc) if you want to reach a larger audience.

Yes. I think it will come down to conducting discussions in threads at
the PPC repo, and posting links to them to r/perl to get eyeballs on
them.


* Paul "LeoNerd" Evans <[email protected]> [2026-03-19 17:18]:
> That said, currently the PPCs repo doesn't have "Discussions" opened,
> only "Issues". I feel the latter is more about talking over minor
> points of existing PPC docs.

… or major points.

But yes, enabling the Discussions tab seems like a good move for this.


-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>