PHP has Zend. Python has Daddy Googlebucks. Java has... let's call it the 1% of programming languages. C# has Microsoft. JavaScript has everybody who's ever written a web browser (except possibly the W3C).

I haven't used Windows for work purposes in ages, but I'm glad ActiveState exists—Perl 5 is much better on Windows for their assistance.

I'm also glad to see Perl Foundation sponsors, especially the ones who've contributed to the Fixing Perl 5 Core Bugs Grant.

Yet I wonder why it's so amazingly difficult to get full-time funding for new Perl 5 core development. (Again, this is not to complain about funding for Nick Clark or Dave Mitchell, because their work is important and valuable and everyone who's contributed deserves gratitude.) I can't decide what I think, but I have some possibilities:

Perhaps Perl is just too effective. It's a tool you apply when you need to do something quick or dirty or now, and after that it just works and you forget about it. (There's a lot of code like this in the world. Then again, a lot of small businesses still run on Access and other 4GLs.)

Perhaps the dominant perception of Perl 5 is a life support system for the CPAN. (Much of the evolution of Perl happens on the CPAN to be sure, and so volunteer effort goes there.)

Certainly it's too difficult to hack on the Perl 5 core, so the available contributor pool is not in what anyone might legitimately call a state of growth.

Perhaps new development in Perl 5 tends to be plumbing tasks and not big, bet-the-company technical choices. (Even though my business relies completely on Perl 5 for its technology stacks, I've long realized that I'm not representative of the world as a whole.)

Perhaps everyone assumes someone else will take care of it. (Larry hasn't had a patron since 2000.)

Perhaps Perl 5 has reached minimum viable utility as it is and needs no more new features. (I have trouble believing this. I could certainly use better parallelism. I've long wanted either or both of hygenic macros and continuations. I could use multiple dispatch today. Grammars would be wonderful. Opaque objects would be grand. Who doesn't want a JIT or more speed or lower memory usage?)

Perhaps backwards compatibility is cannibalizing usage from current (and future) releases. (Red Hat and CentOS, please feel free to join Perl 5 in the 21st century. We're pretty sure this century will stick by now.)

Perhaps TPF isn't effective at courting donors. (I hesitate to bring this up, because it sounds like criticism, but that's not the intent. I do believe TPF has successfully courted some donors, which is the reason why Nick and Dave have funding right now, and I have no desire to criticize the work or abilities or interests of volunteers doing things I have no desire to do, but it does seem fair to say that I haven't seen much effort in the past five years to talk to large Perl shops to express a coherent vision for core development.)

Perhaps (and I find this most likely) there's no coherent vision for Perl 5 core development. Jesse Vincent's Perl 5.16 and Beyond (video link) lays out a good and effective and necessary philosophy for how to manage changes, but is there really anything to get excited about? strict and warnings by default?

and by default? Perl 6 didn't save Perl. (Yes, yes, Milestones in the Perl Renaissance, but "Someday this will be amazing!" becomes less amazing the longer someday takes.)

It's no one thing and it's probably a combination of several things to various degrees. I hope that someone like the amazing Mike Pall of LuaJIT might come along and demonstrate a powerful proof of concept of something exciting (better parallelism/concurrency, macros, an improved parser, a working JIT, a no-XS extension mechanism, an 80% port of the sanest parts of Perl 5 to a different virtual machine, whatever). Maybe that's Reini Urban, and maybe it's someone we don't know about yet.

It's difficult to imagine someone new jumping in to the big wad of heavily-macroed C code that's the current Perl 5 implementation and having all of the time, interest, and energy to learn what's going on as well as the luck, skill, and patience to make substantive changes without horribly breaking a dozen things elsewhere while successfully convincing p5p that the changes are worthwhile and maintainable and won't be the subject of massive imprecations and furrowed brows in two years.

Maybe I'm just a pessimist today though.

What do you think?