Re: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl?

Well, I think, "rewriting" the language to be completely different from Perl 6 and also wanting to "change" the community, sounds like a very unrealistic dream.

I followed the development of Perl 6 as a mostly inactive lurker since 2002 (edit: A lurker who has been subscribed to perl6-all mailing list, reading regularly and even discussing back then).

It didn't look to me like Perl 5 was that much dictated by Larry, at least not in the last 6-8 years. But it's indeed true that the process of "Perl 6" was a quite democratic one, starting with the RFCs it was based on direct community input from the start.

Perl 5 evolved over years of development, being iteratively improved from version to version, always having a working implementation which actually did stuff in a production environment. That formed a community of people who mostly itch their own scratch, which is a very good motivational factor to invest time into the development of Perl 5.

Perl 6 didn't evolve, they threw away most of Perl 5, maybe except the sigil syntax, also things were promised that never were realized or could actually be realized, which formed a community of dreamers, following the dream of the ultimate programming language. And currently it looks like those dreamers weren't able to deliver _anything_ at least remotely stable, except a very fuzzy specification and a test suite.

Status is, as far as I followed it the last years and recently had a rough look at the parrot code: parrot got some basic subsystems that qualify it as an experimental VM: A JIT, a very simplistic GC (remember: the incremental and generation collectors, which actually float around in it's code, don't work) and a lot of intermediate languages leveled on top of each other.

"Perl 6" is a language specification which at least iterated _once_ over the 8 years, through the development of the now abandoned PUGS. But it still got no stable release yet, after 8 years. At least the work is now flowing into something thats probably going to be the final Perl 6 compiler, called, I think, Rakudo.

I maybe sound a bit cynic, I originally was very fond of the idea of a _dynamic_ VM and a new version of Perl 5, which got some more syntactic sugar and concepts. But I felt stalled, with Perl 6 being developed and hyped all over the internet. Coding Perl 5 felt like coding in an obsolete language. Also others who I asked felt the same. Promises of the money founded Perl 6 community weren't and couldn't be delivered after 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and finally 8 years of money founded development.

A year (or maybe 2, I guess everyone had a different "timeout") ago many finally realized that there won't be a replacement of Perl 5 anytime soon, and the Perl 5 community moved on, leaving "Perl 6" behind, and actually improved the language they all loved and knew, which even works in production environments.

Someone of the Perl 6 community is probably coming soon and will jump all over my statements. So remember that this is just one view, and mostly from the outside, of the state of affairs.

Comment on Re: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl?

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Re^2: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 02, 2009 at 18:31 UTC
Perl 6 didn't evolve, they threw away most of Perl 5.... Untrue. The apocalypses have always been deltas against Perl 5. Promises of the money founded Perl 6 community weren't and couldn't be delivered after 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and finally 8 years of money founded development. How much money? Do you know? (I'll tell you this -- all of the money that's gone into Parrot, Pugs, Perl 6, Rakudo, SMOP, Elf, and whatever else in the past eight years couldn't buy you one year of the time spent on the JVM or the CLR. You might be able to pay for the coffee breaks of all of the developers of either system.) So remember that this is just one view, and mostly from the outside, of the state of affairs. That amuses me. It's not as if we're some secret cabal who meets in shadowy, dark rooms to cackle and drink brandy and smoke big cigars and plot the future. There are eight freakin' years of email you could dig through to find out what's happened. I've published design minutes from weekly Perl 6 meetings for years. There's no super-secret initiation ceremony into the hidden mysteries of Perl 6. All you have to do to become part of the secret shadowy cabal of volunteer community members developing Perl 6 is ask a question on IRC or a mailing list, submit a patch, write a test, report test results, point out a typo in the documentation, or a dozen other very small tiny things. I'm not sure how we could make that easier, other than kidnapping you and tying your hands to the keyboard. I just don't get why it's easier to speculate about things from a perspective you admit is flawed, especially when it's so simple to get a better perspective.	[reply]
Re^3: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl? by kyle (Abbot) on Jan 02, 2009 at 19:33 UTC
I just don't get why it's easier to speculate about things As you say, there are "eight freakin' years of email" to "dig through." It's so much easier to speculate! I've semi-casually tried to get an idea of "what's going on with Perl 6" a few times. Perhaps my attempts have been unreasonably casual, but they've not been very satisfying. Getting a good perspective is simple the same way reading the Camel from cover to cover is simple, which is to say it's easier to understand how to do it than it is to take the time to do it.	[reply]
Re^4: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 02, 2009 at 20:00 UTC
It's so much easier to speculate! I suppose one way to read that is as a complaint that we've put out far too much information about what we're doing and why.	[reply]
Re^5: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by kyle (Abbot) on Jan 02, 2009 at 20:08 UTC
Re^3: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by elmex (Friar) on Jan 02, 2009 at 20:50 UTC
1. I said I followed the development as a lurker. As a lurker subscribed to perl6-all mailing list, reading mostly regularly. I know pretty well what happened the last 6 years. 2. I also didn't say or admit that my perspective is flawed. I only said what my perspective is. 3. Why should I spent one minute on coding for Perl 6 when I can actually do new stuff and solve my problems with an already good language which I don't have to bugfix (Perl 5).	[reply]
Re^4: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 02, 2009 at 21:39 UTC
Why should I spent one minute on coding for Perl 6 when I can actually do new stuff and solve my problems with an already good language which I don't have to bugfix (Perl 5). If everyone had the same attitude, there'd be no PerlMonks, no CPAN, no Perl 6, and no Perl 5, to name a few projects which exist due to volunteer effort. I know pretty well what happened the last 6 years. If you think, as you wrote: Perl 6 didn't evolve, they threw away most of Perl 5, maybe except the sigil syntax, also things were promised that never were realized or could actually be realized, which formed a community of dreamers, following the dream of the ultimate programming language. And currently it looks like those dreamers weren't able to deliver _anything_ at least remotely stable, except a very fuzzy specification and a test suite. ... then I don't believe -- at all -- that you know what happened the past few years.	[reply]
Re^5: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by elmex (Friar) on Jan 02, 2009 at 23:14 UTC
Re^6: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 03, 2009 at 01:08 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re^4: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by jeffa (Bishop) on Jan 02, 2009 at 21:01 UTC
I think chromatic meant that if you think you are on the outside, than that itself is the flawed perspective. The only one preventing you from "getting in" is yourself. You are welcome here. (If you know the secret knock. Just kidding. :P) jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^5: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by elmex (Friar) on Jan 02, 2009 at 21:16 UTC
Re^3: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by jeffa (Bishop) on Jan 02, 2009 at 20:57 UTC
"All you have to do to become part of the secret shadowy cabal of volunteer community members developing Perl 6 is ask ..." Sounds familiar ... http://www.askafreemason.org/ ;) jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply]
Re^2: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl? by zby (Vicar) on Jan 02, 2009 at 09:49 UTC
The question if the rewrite is an interesting subject, given that it is still not finished and there are reasonable doubts if it will ever be finished, is another discussion. Personally I became quite confident in the Perl6 development after the publishing of The Parrot Roadmap. I am waiting for one for Rakudo now.	[reply]
Re^3: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl? by elmex (Friar) on Jan 02, 2009 at 10:32 UTC
Ok, then more close to the original subject: Originally it was a "community rewrite", but recently Larry got more and more involved with actual "Perl 6" development, but is still not the driving force. _If_ "Perl 6" is ever finished the current way it is developed, I would call it a rewrite, which was driven by a "community". I would say it's not "the community rewrite" but "a community rewrite". The question is also which community we are talking about. It certainly is not the Perl 5 community (largely consisting of people active on p5p and all the authors who upload their modules to CPAN). Of course there are some people who are involved in both communities, like for instance Nicolas Clark or chromatic. As far as I perceived it: The bulk of the people who originally formed the "Perl 6" community, writing and discussing the RFCs, attracted people who were interested in experimenting with programming languages. After some years of breeding out new ideas and no real progress on the parrot/perl6 implementation front the bulk of Perl 5 people left mostly. So we got the community of active developers who want to get things done in realtime on the Perl 5 side, and another community of language experimentalists on the Perl 6 side.	[reply]
Re^2: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl? by puudeli (Pilgrim) on Jan 02, 2009 at 10:45 UTC
I too have been eagerly waiting for Perl6 for a long time and now it has receded to be just a vague dream. I like the idea of Perl6 a lot and I hope that it will see the light of day. Preferably sooner than later, but only in a form that is usable, like Perl5. -- `seek $her, $from, $everywhere if exists $true{love};`	[reply] [d/l]


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