Re^5: A "Perl-7" that I could actually USE right now

[raiph]

Illegitimi non carborundum

Yes, I'd say I'm the P6 tell-all. I'm not much of a coder these days but I've been following the project since the start (with time off for good behavior); participating in the P6 community around the edges; reading #perl6 daily for 2 years; producing daily summaries of #perl6 for a year.

Jenda's post provided some useful stats but his/her narrative didn't square with reality and was unfair to people I feel I know and love and ultimately to the entire Perl community.

I think innocent bystanders are likely to believe the picture painted by posts like Jenda's and think P6 is a dead, dying or at least struggling project. Given that I know otherwise and ultimately care about the whole Perl community more than Perl 6, I post facts that might mitigate the destructive elements of this armchair analysis and am willing to endure the attacks such as yours.

I'm pretty much the only monk who focuses their PM posts on P6. Moritz Lenz is a respected monk and well loved top P6 hacker, but he seldom mentions it here at PM, in large part because a handful of vocal PMers are so unfriendly. Stefan O'Rear, another top P6 hacker, pretty much only posts code, technical documentation, and release announcements ever, and never here at PM. Really, other than me, how often do you see someone posting about P6?

Excepting me, P6ers are basically doing exactly as you suggest. They are working their butts off, developing the system that Larry Wall designed to help save Perl's bacon in years to come, and ship code and technical documentation, with little fanfare and even less credit.

The P6 project has been shipping something every month for nearly SIX YEARS. Of course, your answer will now be that you didn't mean "SHIP SOMETHING", you didn't mean ship crap, but rather ship something folk can use. And then I'll point out that it isn't crap and some folk are using it. And then you'll argue that it must be crap otherwise I wouldn't have called it just something and you didn't mean a handful of early adopters, you meant average folk. And so it goes on. I understand that you are frustrated or annoyed or whatever that P6 isn't what you want it to be when you want it. That doesn't mean misleading posts are best left unchallenged, if you care about the monastery and broader Perl community, and is the reason I respond to posts such as Jenda's. (Usually I ignore trolls such as yours.)

[Anonymous Monk]

"That doesn't mean misleading posts are best left unchallenged..." That's why I respond to your misleading posts. People are unfriendly to Perl-6 because of people like you, you all who keep promising how it is almost ready even though it hasn't lived up to the hype. Ever.

[raiph]

I am not meaning to promise anything, to say P6 is almost ready for you, that it will live up to its hype. I think you are misinterpreting my words.

Let's look at some of what I'm actually saying. For the last few months, when I've written here about P6, I've typically included a prominent box that says:

»»» This post is about the immature Perl 6, not the rock solid Perl 5 «««

This in turn links to a post I wrote this summer that says:

Perl 6 is not remotely as usable and useful as Perl 5; it has dozens of users, not millions; it is 100-1000x slower than Perl 5 for a lot of stuff; the P6 documentation is immature and incomplete; the spec has not reached 6.0.0; the Rakudo compiler has not fully implemented what's already in the spec; most of the concurrency and parallel implementation has only just begun; P6 can not currently use CPAN modules; Perl 6 has syntax and semantics that are not backwards compatible with Perl 5; Perl 6 culture is -Ofun which some think is incompatible with getting things done; some folk think that Perl 6 code looks like line noise... In summary, there are infinitely many things wrong with P6.

Is that not clear enough for you?

[Anonymous Monk]

Perl-6 IS struggling you fool! It is over 13 years old and still not even the design is finished. It doesn't matter who works his butts off trying to make it happen when Perl-6 has been a struggling and dying project for years and years and years. All of your chattering about how great things are right now and all of your relentless badgering people about conversations on IRC or articles are wasting time. There is no point to writing an article about how to do something in Perl-6 right now when that thing will change several times before anyone can even use Perl-6.

How many years of advent articles no longer work because they only ran on Pugs or Necza or Parrot and those are now broken? How many no longer run because the design of Perl-6 changed? How many no longer run because they use some library that no longer runs?

Be honest and tell people that half of the things you are blabbering about will be obsolete and useless within a year and that Perl-6 still won't be ready for them to use in that same time period!

Do you even lift, bro?