note Your Mother <h4>Marketing</h4> Q: How can you market Perl 6? A: You cannot. It's not ready for the market. I'd argue it's not pre-alpha. You can run it and write useful things with it today. But it's not stable enough or close enough to feature complete to be something that any sane tech managers would be bundling up as the engine for a vendible product. The question this leads to is "What will happen if you try to market Perl 6 now, aka, too early?" The same thing that would have happened to Apple if they'd tried to market the iPod early. Ridicule, skepticism at best. Loss of attention. High resistance to adoption on launch. <h4>PR</h4> Q: How can you do public relations for Perl 6? A: Like Perl 5 has begun to do. Iron Man Perl, EPO, Summer of Code, etc. Should you? No, not yet! The only thing it can serve to do is fuel skepticism and ridicule again. How many years did it take for Perl to get out from under the "it's too slow" meme? Ten? It only finally has because Java was, and Ruby is, slower still so most of the rats finally shut up about it. Imagine another ten years of that shite because the world at large experiences early, unoptimized Perl 6 which makes Ruby look like Erlang. External PR for Perl 6 cannot help anyone. It just serves to cause sideshows like the last couple threads and reinforce the idea that there is confusion simply because there are some who are confused. I'm not a Perl 6 dev or even a user, I've written fewer than 10 toy scripts in it so far, but I knew the answers to most of the concerns because I pay attention to the community. Perl 6 smells wonderful to me but it is half-baked. Only a desperate, addled chef rings the dinner bell now. Now, this– <blockquote>We've had 10 years of very productive Perl 5 development. It would have been very interesting to see what those 10 years would have been like had some of the uglier parts of the core been deprecated in favor of some of the features in Perl 6. </blockquote> –has been refuted in this thread already as both impossible and actively detrimental to the goal it sets out. If you haven't worked on the implementation of those parts of the core, this feels mildly insulting and just disconnected from reality. It's the "Why can't I have a pony?" again. Because ponies are really actually not as easy as they look to a little kid.  If you're not going to get personally involved in developing and writing code for Perl 6, just pretend it doesn't exist or frankly it seems to me you're actively hurting its progress. These discussions—which are outside of the regular lists, meetings, and decision making process—don't clarify or improve the prognosis and they are, obviously from the OP, actively irritating and potentially detrimental to the only persons trying to deliver the thing. I've nearly quit projects before from getting critiques, even ones I may have deserved, which were delivered out of turn or without etiquette. I can't imagine what it would be like to deal with it on a continuous basis. I wouldn't blame anyone who wouldn't put up with it. Q: Do you want Perl 6? A: Backseat driving can only serve to slow the trip down and make the drivers start to hate their task. No one does, or can be expected to do, a good job when it stops being fun. Help keep it fun. If you're still impatient, go evangelize for Perl 5; it's better all the time and its critics are easier to counter. (update: speling.) 836349 836491