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

[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?

[raiph]

Be honest and tell people that half of the things you are blabbering about will be obsolete and useless within a year

The vision for the monastery is that we try to help each other. Dishonesty doesn't remotely fit. (Fwiw, imo being unkind isn't a whole lot better.)

Ignoring areas such as concurrency and NFG, and bug fixing and implementing features previously unimplemented, I see increasing stability. Perhaps you could name a P6 topic I've talked about that you think has been affected by instability?

Do you trust Larry Wall (or jnthn, or anyone involved in P6) to be honest? Anyone can join freenode's #perl6 IRC channel to engage in a one-on-one dialog with Larry Wall (nick TimToady).

[Anonymous Monk]

Deny, deflect, defer. Sorry ralph, your kool-aid mustache is showing. Maybe this is the year Perl-6 decides if for loops are really eager or lazy. Maybe this is the year someone finishes the module synopsis. Maybe this is the year Patrick finishes the list redesign. Maybe this is the year Larry finally chooses names for synchronization primitives. Maybe this is the year you admin Necza has finally shuffled off into Pugs-like irrelevance.

Deny, deflect, defer.

It's not unkind to point out untruths, ralph. Surely even you know that.