the longer story is:
last summer a plan was revealed (and hatched in secret) to change the default behavior of perl's interpreter. perl not being a language where binaries are distributed in a compiled manner, but code is and then compiled on the system, this would break a LOT OF STUFF.
9 months were spent on trying to explain this, and how versioning the language is the only way forward without causing linux distros to drop perl
part of the disagreement was "but if we can never remove cruft, then adding new features is impossible". several core c developers opined "this is not true".
now yesterday it was announced that instead of changing defaults, `use 7;` would be implemented to collapse several lines of boilerplate and make code marked such behave more friendly.
someone asked about the cruft, and the above discussion ensued
imo the primary issue appears to be that sawyer took a lot of the criticisms of the perl 7 change defaults plan personally
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i'd like to reply, but hn thinks waiting 50 minutes ain't enough
sawyer was a manager, not a c developer of the perl core, and he replied to a thread mst started, so i disagree with your characterizations
vvvv