Re^5: Hockey Sticks

[Anonymous Monk]

Click the Late, Fat and Ugly link.

It nice of you to assume I didn't, that still doesn't explain your stupid message. You want chromatic to STFU because he is burning his bridges with perl6??? Maybe you've read Waiting for a Product, not a Compiler

[raiph]

Maybe you've read Waiting for a Product, not a Compiler

Yes, I read that the day he posted it. As I'm sure did many other monks interested in... Moose.

My conclusion is that chromatic is "Waiting for a Product, not a Compiler", just as I conclude is true of Wendell Hatcher (try spotting the request for feedback on a Perl6 Hague Grant in this list; hint, it has 16 messages).

Is it any wonder that Perl 6 is more starved for fresh volunteers and enthusiasts than can be reasonably explained by fatigue? It would be far better for Perl 6 posts to suffer Warnock's dilemma than this continual misguided "tough love" (to be charitable) and trolling.

You want chromatic to STFU because he is burning his bridges with perl6???

No. I don't want chromatic to STFU.

I hope chromatic will hear that I think repeatedly responding to "hey, glass is half full!" with "ah, but it's half empty!" turns people away from helping fill the glass, even if it's true that the half-fullers don't seem to be being mathematically rigorous about how much water is in the glass, and even if he ended up thirsty because he thought there was more water in the glass.

Fwiw, assuming I'm right that he's burning bridges (which may well be just in my imagination), I expect there'll always be bridges, because the Perl 6 community, reflecting Larry's character, not mine, would help him build new ones.

[chromatic]

Is it any wonder that Perl 6 is more starved for fresh volunteers and enthusiasts than can be reasonably explained by fatigue?

I see—it's my fault that Rakudo Star's gone nowhere usable for at least a year. That's the obvious explanation, and not that Rakudo went off the rails when it's continually failed to improve its bus number, reimplemented large portions of Parrot badly, forked into a dead branch from which Star releases slowly petered out (hey, even compiler releases slipped and skipped), and went into yet another rewrite mode which is still suffering from scope creep? Somehow I get the blame for saying back in December 2010 "Hey, this proposed rewrite has some huge risks and I'm afraid it'll take at least twice as long as you estimate?", when everyone else said "That's crazy, why are you so mean, it's fast and easy and we won't make any mistakes this time!"

My posts right here are the problem?

The most charitable one word response I can muster is nonsense.

This #perl6 persecution complex is bizarre. Every major Perl 6 implementation has had severe project management problems; blaming skeptics for not jumping up and down at the message "Yay, a single number measurement with no meaning behind it has increased, Christmas is coming!" after eleven and a half years of promises yet to be fulfilled is ... well, I don't see it working.

If you want to fix the Perl 6 marketing message, release usable software, and don't lie to people that it's useful and usable (if you pull from HEAD at the right time and can work around regressions and don't mind reading source code and not documentation and are willing to update from HEAD—wait, it was renamed nom a while back—and hang out on IRC all day and...).

[raiph]

Rakudo went off the rails when it's continually failed to improve its bus number

Rakudo hasn't gone off the rails. pmichaud was lead dev, and he is of course intermittently dropping out of the picture due to his wife's illness. That sucks. In the last 12 months there has been loads of work by jnthn, moritz, tadzik, japhb, and colomon, and many others.

reimplemented large portions of Parrot badly

Whiteknight, current Parrot lead dev: "6model is far superior to what Parrot provides now".

forked into a dead branch from which Star releases slowly petered out (hey, even compiler releases slipped and skipped)

They missed 1 monthly compiler release last year and chose to defer an update to Rakudo Star till the new branch was stable. A new Star is due out in a few weeks.

and went into yet another rewrite mode which is still suffering from scope creep?

Rewriting isn't an end in itself. There's an overall objective. Ship a sufficiently complete, bug-free, fast, documented, product as fast as possible. If it helps towards that, it isn't scope creep.

"Hey, this proposed rewrite has some huge risks..."

To have NOT done the rewrite involved the ultimate risk: relying on Parrot to fix technical and project problems that the Rakudo team considered life-and-death for Rakudo. The Rakudo team is glad it did 6model, qregex, etc. even if merging it all has taken a long time, because it was ultimately necessary to give Rakudo a shot at reasonable performance.

Every major Perl 6 implementation has had severe project management problems

It's taken 12 years so far. It clearly didn't go smoothly. But ignoring Parrot, and other than the usual problems that beset even reasonably well run OSS projects, like a low bus number, what are the problems you are talking about?

blaming skeptics for not jumping up and down at the message "Yay, a single number measurement with no meaning behind it has increased, Christmas is coming!"

You may think there's no meaning behind numbers except that which is mathematical, and maybe you had to be there during the weeks that ran up to it, but I wasn't the only one who felt that 100.02% was magical, and I was sharing a celebration, my first Meditation in 3 years. If you don't feel like sharing in the good vibe, that's fine, but you could still choose not to pour cold water over it.

If you want to fix the Perl 6 marketing message, release usable software

Imo we're nowhere near the point that we can fix the Perl 6 marketing message as it relates to non-contributors. It's almost universally ridiculed, just like Mozilla was the year before Firefox was released. Imo it's worth trying to fix the message as it relates to potential contributors, so we can get the bus number up. Perl 6.0.0 will ship before Christmas but it could do with help if that's to be this Christmas (or, perhaps more realistically, Christmas 2013; maybe even later -- really, it's very hard to predict).