This wasn’t really a talk, it was more “ask Schwern questions and he’ll answer them and maybe go off on a tangent about something else.”
First question was a two-parter: what do you want to work on next year and what don’t you want to work on next year?
First answer is for the second question: PHP. Second answer for the first question: he wants to be (or make) the Red Hat of CPAN. He wants to take the 5000 modules and 2000 developers and have one front-end where things just work. When you’re using a module from CPAN you don’t know what you’re going to get, as modules change all the time with new releases. Schwern wants to change this somehow.
Regarding PHP, Schwern is working with PHP full-time. He says that the good thing about PHP is that when you download it, it just works right out of the box. You don’t have to worry about modules and plugins and whatnot. This leads to PHP’s bad side: global namespace pollution. There are 75 built-in functions to deal with arrays and 13 different sort functions. Crazy!
He wants to declare ExtUtils::MakeMaker finished. Go use Module::Build instead!
A while back Damian Conway said something about Perl 5 + i, which was kind of a joke in that Damian way, but Schwern went and created perl5i. It modifies perl5 “so it fits how it works in [Schwern's] imagination” by enabling a bunch of modules automatically, like Modern::Perl, Time::Piece and autobox.
Then there was something about how being polyamorous is like Agile software development.
