Re: Perl 6 ... dead?

[chromatic]

in reply to Perl 6 ... dead?

Whats your opinion regarding perl and parrot?

Almost everything that Perl 6 needs from Parrot has either an implementation or a fairly stable design. Dan and Leo have a detailed status chart and know what needs work at various stages for Perl 6.

Patrick and Luke are starting the grammar engine this week, after working through some design issues in the previous couple of weeks.

Larry's writing up Synopses for Apocalypses which don't have them yet, including some of the skipped Apocalypses. I've seen a draft for S9 (Data Structures). Damian, Hugo, Nick, and Luke have provided lots of comments on these.

Allison is finishing a roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months of the project. This may include funding developers again.

I have a handful of patches, a couple of proposals, and some odd chunks of code that exercise dusty corners of Parrot objects and NCI.

Several other people maintain documentation, web pages, TODO lists, and contribute code, bugfixes, and practical experience.

Of the people I've seen or heard complain about Perl 6 in recent memory, none have actually contributed anything useful -- documentation, tests, code, bug reports, or stories.

[BrowserUk]

Of the people I've seen or heard complain about Perl 6 in recent memory, none have actually contributed anything useful...

Maybe someone should be asking the question: Why are there so few contributers to the project?

[chromatic]

Count the number of active contributors (in the past six months) to Perl 5 sometime.

[jryan]

Probably because most of the Perl6 design is done in secret. First the language, and now the compiler. No one contributes because, well, no one really knows what is going on besides the inner cabal. I guess they feel that they can do a better job without the rest of us interfering. I emailed Patrick right after he was announced as compiler pumpking offering to help, and I was told that they want to have a prototype done before they even take it to the list. It doesn't feel very "community-rewrite"-ish or even "open-source"-ish to me.

Now, contrast that with parrot...

[chromatic]

I think you're inadvertently mischaracterizing Patrick's comments.

Now, contrast that with parrot...

Parrot's a project several years further along, used in production, with tens of contributors, and a lead designer who prefers to design the skeleton of a system before announcing it and showing off code. Aside from the first three, they're not too different (and the first three are a function of time).

There's really no point in distributing a couple of empty header and source files right now. How do you solicit patches from volunteers if there's nothing to patch? Also, the new lists aren't ready yet, so there's a good reason not to announce things on the wrong list.

That's not to say that there's no discussion; see p6i from just today with comments on regex semantics from Larry, Dan, and Patrick.

[zby]

The design of Perl 6 was started with RFC's. I cannot imagine how this can be considered secret.

[duff]

First, a few points

• the community isn't rewriting the compiler, they are rewriting the language
• the design of the language has never been secret
• it's hard to open-source something that has no source yet

Do you begrudge Patrick and Luke some private time to get their act together? You'd rather that happen in public? Do you fear that they will head off in the wrong direction or that they will miss something vitally important before publicly releasing code?

Or are you afraid they'll waste time covering ground that's already been covered (as I glean from another post in this thread)? I see this as Patrick's time to ramp-up. Even if he covers already-covered ground that's okay because he's the one charged with doing the work and he needs to learn the things he needs to learn to get the job done.

[jryan]

Documentation? Tests? Remember the disaster with the perl6-documentation list? We couldn't even get basic literals documented due to a lack of any solid information source. Code? Bug Reports? Patrick and Luke are designing and coding off-list and off-cvs.

Sure, a lot of the people who complain are just a bunch of whiny jerks. But if you're not interested in parrot itself (the compiler, regex engine, documentation, tests, builtin-functions, core classes and libraries), there really isn't a lot that a non-cabal member can do for Perl6.

[chromatic]

Remember the disaster with the perl6-documentation list?

I remember it as the "Oh my goodness we have to document absolutely every part of the language starting from the absolute simplest bits and not moving on until we have those things absolutely perfectly complete oh by the way the bungee leader will disappear for three months" list.

It helps if you imagine Rocky J. Squirrel responding with "But Bullwinkle, that trick never works!"

Perhaps a more charitable lesson to learn is "Don't start a mailing list until people actually do work."

[jryan]

Oh, I completely agree. However, the list couldn't even make it past those absolute simplest bits. We're talking about freakin' literals here! There wasn't enough solid ground to document *LITERALS*! I mean, come on, if we couldn't get past strings and numbers what's going to happen with something complicated?