Re: Perl 6 coming out in 18 months(?)

[bsdz]

My guess would be a little longer than 18 months before we have a stable release of Perl6 on Parrot. Certain design concepts are still in the making (just see the Perl6-Language mailing list!). For example, I still don't know how Perl6 will handle multi-threading?

How nice it would be to have P6/Parrot at the same time as C++09!

On the otherhand, Perl6/Pugs is already here albeit a little slow!

[TimToady]

Hmm, well, don't be too put off by what happens on the mailing lists; we all like to do our share of bikeshed painting, but a lot of that is just noise. Most of the recent design decisions have actually been simplifications to make implementation easier.

As for threading and events, we've purposefully put that off till we understand how Perl can be properly multi-paradigmatic in that realm. The eventual model is probably going to be something like the unified approach taken in this paper. This being Perl, we will not tell people that they're using a thread continuation monad, because that would be scary. Something like "thread control objects" sounds much friendlier. Perl is all about letting people think they know what's going on until they really need to know what's going on. :-)

[blazar]

Hmm, well, don't be too put off by what happens on the mailing lists; we all like to do our share of bikeshed painting, but a lot of that is just noise. Most of the recent design decisions have actually been simplifications to make implementation easier.

Hehe, to quote someone you may know:

Me too. If it's any comfort, just think of the design of Perl 6 as a genetic algorithm running on a set of distributed wetware CPUs. We'll just keep mutating our ideas till they prove themselves adaptive.

This being Perl, we will not tell people that they're using a thread continuation monad, because that would be scary.

To quote again (someone else):

And continuations. But continuations are scary. Good scary, but still scary.

[apotheon]

Perl is all about letting people think they know what's going on until they really need to know what's going on.

I love that. It seems (appropriately) applicable to the confusion in the community over how close Perl 6 is to being done, too.

Frankly, I'm a fan of the "it's done when it's done" approach -- it tends to lead to better software when all is said and done, assuming you have enthusiastic people working on it, in my experience. I'm also impatient to have a stable Perl 6 to play with, though. For one thing, that's when the good tutorial documentation will start to appear, and I'd really like to start reading the stuff.

[syphilis]

Perl is all about letting people think they know what's going on until they really need to know what's going on

++ TimToady. After all these years you can still keep coming up with pertinent aphorisms.

Cheers,
Rob
I'm assuming that was a newie :-)