There are lots of small, even one-line modules in NPM. So I don't believe the comparison.

Is there any testimonial using TokuDB?

Hope this helps, from Tokutek's website: http://www.tokutek.com/solutions/

Edit, oops followed parents link to this: http://www.tokutek.com/products/tokudb-for-mysql/:

"Tools such as Hot Backup (coming soon) allow a backup to be completed while database is running."

- Does that mean that someone using the opensource version would be unable to take a backup of a running database?

Someone using the open source version can take backups just as they would with our versions prior to 7.0:

- snapshots (LVM, EBS, etc...)

- cold backups

- mysqldump (with MVCC, this is technically hot)

I think that's true. Forth is so called "ultimate low-level language".

Where is Slava Pestov now? Haven't seen him for a long time.

He got a job at Google back in 2010 and pretty much handed over the reins at that time due to lack of free time to work on Factor. He still posts on the mailing list though periodically.

I'm always looking forward to Perl6, waiting for its stable version, for 10 years.

I think perl 5.10 and beyond kind of preempted perl 6.

Alas, perl 6 in some ways isn't even perl. Perl 6 is cool, but Larry should have made a new name for his next hobby :-)

Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two different languages; Perl 6 is a sibling, rather than successor, to Perl 5.

http://dev.perl.org/

As I understand, it has been going on for as long as Python 3 -- which is starting to be used in a few places now. (The difference is that Perl 6 is really, really, really ambitious. Let's see if it ever gets production-ready.)

sounds like pointers in C vs C++

worse is better?

clearly not: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=ruby+on+rails,+node.js,+just...