Re^6: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk

[moritz]

Suppose for a moment that I buy your argument that it's too early to do marketing for Perl 6 - then how should we attract contributors, when nobody knows about it? And without contributors, how are we ever going to get to a point where it's ready for marketing, by your reckoning?

Saying "Don't to marketing for Perl 6 yet" is basically the same as saying "Don't bother at all".

Perl 6 smells wonderful to me but it is half-baked. Only a desperate, addled chef rings the dinner bell now.

I for one don't try to announce Perl 6 as a finished dinner. If people ask me, I plainly tell them that Perl 6 isn't very mature yet, but if they care I still try to drive their appetite - after all some people like it when their steak isn't cooked through, or to pinch a bit while cooking.

[Your Mother]

I see your point. I was speaking specifically to the idea that the world outside the Perl community needs the marketing. I think marketing there is a mistake and has more downside than up for the immediate future. I also think marketing is a mismatch with attracting contributors. Marketing, at face value, is attracting buyers. I know we're talking about it in a broader sense but I think it's an important distinction.

It probably is the time to ramp up the call for participation and use internally. When devs like me, firmly in the "not an internals hacker" type, are starting to get interested on our own, we probably just need a bit more direction from the "core" team. I'm a good example. I'm smart enough to help with certain pieces but by no means smart enough to dig in from the top and find where I should be trying to help.

This is difficult timing also because Perl 5 got *much* more interesting in the last 2-5 years. Moose, Plack, DBIC, Catalyst, DateTime, KiokuDB, FormFu, and so many more… I'm just starting to get good at some of that and it's fun and exciting and takes all extra tuits. And Perl 6's discussions are often awfully meta. The kind of stuff that only about 15 of the "Saints in our Book" can even follow. So it's intimidating as much as exciting.

A core of tutorials and projects could go miles to getting the mid-level devs like me more engaged. It would be a huge amount of work for whoever took it on though and it might be early even for that. We're the second wave. The ones who will do a lot of the "ant" work of carrying pebbles from Perl 5 to 6 ("porting" CPAN). The really smart cats who should be on the job now, seem to be to me. I'm personally in no hurry and I don't see that anyone is doing anything wrong while working on Perl 6 in any capacity he or she chooses. So don't mistake my disdain for much of this but-what-if/where's-my-pony for criticism. I'm just happy it's chugging along at any speed.

Um… I seem to have written myself into a corner without any strong finisher. Go team!

[moritz]

I was speaking specifically to the idea that the world outside the Perl community needs the marketing.

You seem to think that all (or most of) the Perl 6 contributors come from the Perl community. That doesn't match my experience. About a third of the people in #perl6 who voice their interest in helping with Perl 6 don't know perl 5 (or the community) very well.

A core of tutorials and projects could go miles to getting the mid-level devs like me more engaged. It would be a huge amount of work for whoever took it on though and it might be early even for that.

I've started with the documentation work with the 5 to 6 blog series, and now a Perl 6 book (work in progress) (together with others). I'd love to get more feedback on either, or ideas for good examples to use.

(Off-topic: finding good (short, instructive, non-contrived and practical examples is quite hard, and takes up much time).

From a technical point of view, the time for porting modules to Perl 6 has almost come. Pure perl modules that don't rely much on IO work fine. For example I ported Date::Simple to Perl 6 in about a day - no huge difficulties due to missing features or stability.

For modules that mostly implement algorithms, now is actually a good time :-)

But you're right, for the average Perl 5 hacker it's probably too much effort right now, due to missing docs and module infrastructure.