[r6rs-discuss] Rationale issues

From: Thomas Lord <lord>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 11:34:19 -0700

Ludovic Court?s wrote:
> Without having to resort to any authority, Guile users have been able to
> choose module names that do not conflict with each other. Same for Snow
> users, Perl users, Python users, etc.
>

Actually, that's false.

For example, in the Perl world, CPAN serves as the central naming
authority.

The design of the language is economically awkward,
in the case of Perl: The language design makes reasonable module
names inherently rival (e.g., a typical module name is "Cgi").
The language's role in IT means that some global authority is
needed for that rival namespace. The design of the language
makes it so that there is room only for one such global naming
authority -- it creates a natural monopoly. That natural
monopoly in turn means that Perl community leaders must
organize, fund, and operate a non-profit organization, in no
small part just to act as the CPAN naming authority. The
barriers to entry for those who would compete with CPAN through
innovation is much higher than it needs to be because continuity
of operations for the naming authority is so valuable relative
even to inefficiencies in the CPAN user interfaces.

One bottom line of the design of module names in Perl is
that the Perl community incurs real money, pure costs of somewhere
between 10s of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars
per year, mostly just to have a naming authority. Another
bottom line is that it's almost economically impossible for a
new entry to the market to compete with CPAN, because of its
natural monopoly.

Those economic failings are evidence of a bad design.

-t
Received on Wed Jun 27 2007 - 14:34:19 UTC