Re: Metrics tracking Perl 6 development

[moritz]

The only metric that matters is "can you do with it what you want to do?". Readiness cannot be meaningfully projected onto a simple number, it's always a question of how your needs and the compiler and ecosystem fulfill those needs. For example most people say that Perl 5 is production ready, but it's still pretty much useless for number crunching/high performance computing -- so it's not ready for this particular use case. So, what readiness number would you give Perl 5, even if it's not ready for every possible use case?

Tracking implemented features is useful, because people want to know if they can use a particular feature. But doing that as a percentage of a pretty much arbitrary goal isn't very useful, because the current usefulness isn't really a function of future plans.

The same holds true for the tests: if we add or remove tests without changing the compiler, the readiness metric changes.

In the end the best thing to do is probably to build cool stuff with Perl 6 (or improve the compiler) and talk about it, instead of trying to come up with complicated (and yet still not very good) ways to measure progress.

[Anonymous Monk]

Something is seriously wrong with you if you say Perl 5 is not ready for production use. By your definition a rocket is not production ready to launch into space because it cannot run on roads. This argument is absurd, and you diverting from the topic.

Even if you by any means of semantic play deduce Perl 5 is not ready for production use. Can you please answer the inevitable question Is Perl 6 at least as much production ready as much as Perl 5 is?

That question captures what people mean when they ask for production readiness of Perl 6. And there are no complicated measurements for productions readiness, some how only Perl 6 is having all these complications, every other piece of compiler in this world slaps '1.0.0' at a point of time with sufficiently acceptable conditions of quality, feature completeness, libraries and documentation and ships it.

If you are not there yet, then you are not there yet. Making the definition the goal ambiguous doesn't mean you achieved your goal.

[moritz]

Is Perl 6 at least as much production ready as much as Perl 5 is?

For what use cases?

You see, Perl 6 isn't meant as a successor for Perl 5 (at least not anymore; that was the original intention for Perl 6, but we've diverted from that path long ago), so it's not clear to me that Perl 6 has to excell in exactly the same spots as Perl 5. So I don't think we need to have a complete superset in productivity to declare it production ready.

That question captures what people mean when they ask for production readiness of Perl 6.

Citation needed. Maybe it captures your idea, but people I talk to all have different ideas of production readiness.

That question captures what people mean when they ask for production readiness of Perl 6.

I frankly admit that on most areas, existing Perl 6 compilers cannot compete with Perl 5 on most "production readiness" metrics. So, if that's the answer you want to hear, please have it and be happy.

But there are a lot of folks who don't need the same level of stability and speed, and who are willing to give up a bit of both in exchange for a much more expressive and consistent language. And for those folks we need a more detailed answer than "yes" or "no". It's for those folks that we blog about our progress, fix bugs, add features and make monthly releases -- not for the anonymous crowd waiting for a release labeled 1.0

[raiph]

Thanks Moritz. That was a helpful response.

I've concluded that if any of the existing metrics I discussed get mentioned on #perl6 they'll probably appear in a #perl6 summary like anything else, but I won't special case any of them.

I've also concluded there's a need for something new. More on that if/when I have something to show.