Re: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl

[stvn]

... how can Perl programmers in the know transfer knowledge of all of the wonderful new features that the admittedly voluminous Perl documentation in the wild doesn't mention.

Well, perl.com has been pretty silent of late, aside from the recent State of the Onion, the last major article was September 21st! I was actually starting to worry that maybe you had lost your job or something :)

Also, the perl.org website is not just ugly, but it is sooooooo 1996 it hurts, all that is missing is a hit-counter and a link to the guestbook. Compare it to python.org with it's cute little icon of snakes having sex. Or the ultra-sexy-web-2.0-compatible ruby website, whose rounded corners and clean typography alone tells me that ruby hackers get laid much more often than any other language hacker, Nuff Said! On the up side, at least we are cooler than TCL, cause that would be really lame.

And while I hate to say it, the "Perl 6/Parrot is vaporware" thing is a problem. Those in the know, know that that is bullshit, but for the rest of the interweb it's just an easy way to shoot down anything about Perl.

I guess my point is that we need a major overhaul of the Perl "image" to more accurately reflect what "Modern Perl" is and can be.

[chromatic]

And while I hate to say it, the "Perl 6/Parrot is vaporware" thing is a problem.

I think petdance was on the right track when he encouraged more people to add their journals to places like Technorati to improve the amount of Perl information disseminated, and Perl Buzz is a good thing.

We release a new version of Parrot every month. Getting other people to talk about that would be nice.

Patrick and I talked a bit yesterday about how to bundle up the nascent perl6 compiler in Parrot into something installable and standalone, and I think we have a good solution there that we can implement in a couple of afternoons, when we both get some time off.

I know lots of people who are not Ovid and perrin and stvn will read this and never say anything, but what you can do to help is talk to your friends and colleagues about all of the cool stuff that we (collectively, because that includes you) are doing. If you talk about it online in your journals and weblogs or other forae, so much the better.

[Cop]

Your logic is weak. Okay there is a release of parrot every month, but that provides no prove that perl 6 is not a vaporware. How many more years you have to fight others with words instead of codes - a final release of perl 6 if there ever will be one?

[chromatic]

Okay there is a release of parrot every month, but that provides no prove that perl 6 is not a vaporware.

Parrot releases have included working versions of Perl 6 under development for years. I've had working Perl 6 code for years, in public, running on versions of Perl 6 developed in public and released in public.

How many more years you have to fight others with words instead of codes - a final release of perl 6 if there ever will be one?

There will be a release of Perl 6.0.0 when the people working on it consider it sufficiently featureful and stable that it deserves that number. The date of that announcement depends on several factors, most of them dealing with "When sufficient people have done sufficient work."

This is how community-developed software works. You've had the ability to download the code for Parrot since 2001 and the code for Pugs since 2005. You can check on their progress at any time you want. We develop everything in public, and we've even published the minutes of the Perl 6 design meetings publicly for at least a year. We don't have anything to hide.

I'd like to see Perl 6.0.0 released very soon, but in the past several months we've made solid progress on it -- despite our resource constraints -- every week, and almost every day in the past month.

Again, we have nothing to hide.

Feel free to call that vaporware if you like, but I'm proud of what we've done with as few resources as we have, and I'm really not sure what else I can do but point out that we've had working code for a long time.

If slapping the "final" tag on something makes it non-vaporware in your eyes, then I believe that's a ridiculous and meaningless metric. There hasn't been a final release of Perl 5 yet -- or Perl 1. The only software that meets your standard is TeX, and people still patch that too.

[Ovid]

++

It is embarrassing that the granddaddy of dynamic languages looks like a granddaddy.

(Yeah, I know we weren't the first, but we paved much of the way)

[stvn]

It is embarrassing that the granddaddy of dynamic languages looks like a granddaddy.

It is so true! I mean even the LISP guys (the original crotchety old programmers) are getting a makeover. Meanwhile we are all still rolling our 20-sided die and stroking our RMS beards complaining that Matts Script Archive ruined it for us all. It's time we shaved that beard into a soul-patch and took up snowboarding or something!

[lecar_red]

++

This really needs to happen. It keeps coming up over and over. Yet it doesn't change. Can we raise money and pay a design firm to do this for us? Or trade them for Perl development?

[Cop]

But this site is not quiet, 5.10 made some people OD, although quite unneccessarily. If anyone expected 5.10 to make a difference, it won't.

At my level, I only look at the big picture, and the question that I asked myself was whether 5.10 would sway some non-perl guys. My answer is no! So calm down.