[Zope] ANN: Perl For Zope

Martijn Faassen faassen@vet.uu.nl
Mon, 29 May 2000 14:38:40 +0200


Chris McDonough wrote:
> Isn't this covered in the FAQ?

The FAQ wasn't referred to directly in the original announcement; there
was a web page with a FAQ but my mail message was already gone before
I read the FAQ.

> Honestly I'm sort of surprised that there is such a strong reaction to
> this.  When you talk about Perl for Zope, you're talking about three
> things:

It wasn't that strong a reaction; I just think Perl is scary. :) I also
think DTML is scary! Expressing my feelings in this is not meant to
be a 'strong reaction'; I wasn't complaining (this time :), sorry if it
seemed like that.

> Perl through the web methods
> Perl external methods
> Glue code to make these things work properly
> 
> I presume you're worried about #3.  Actually, I shouldn't presume that,
> I don't know what you're actually worried about.  Umm... what *are* you
> all worried about?

I think it'd be mostly glue code, changes to the Zope core, possible
side-effects on this change on the Python part (in the sense of "well,
we can't do that as that would break Perl compatilility"), all before
interfaces have stabilized. The interfaces project is _very_ important,
and as another poster expressed, afterwards it's fine to add stuff to
the core. Before, it's fairly scary.

Anyway, I wasn't that scared. I just don't want to _see_ the Perl support;
don't want to have to think about it at all. Cool for the Perl folks, 
but I just don't want to deal with the consequences myself. :)

This is probably because it isn't a feature that helps me any; I'm
willing to deal with the consequences of features that I'm interested in, so
this is in part selfish.

Perhaps more focus on COM/CORBA style component integration could also
mitigate this problem? Imagine we build such a future system; if the Perl
system goes *around* such an interface, we'll end up with more complex code.

Regards,

Martijn