Re^3: What will the Perl 6 interpreter be written in?

[systems]

Okay, I just want to add, I think many people who use Perl, write small programs and scripts, and from the questions asked here, many of those struggle with seemingly simple tasks, like reading and writing to files, regular expressions, using a dbms engine with Perl, etc ...

Writing a compiler, a VM, designing a language, obviously needs a lot more background information and education that is probably not availble with many people

I think to even consider contributing to a language project, you have to read at least several books on automata theory, machine languages, infinite machine, compiler design. Books in those topics are usually huge and hard to read books and some of those topics requires background information themselves in certain types of math etc ... more reading, more big hard books

So I am sure finding educated people willing to contribute is hard, or maybe you guys are not promoting the project to the right type of people (the right type might be PhD students and academics)

Finally, maybe I am exagerating, maybe its not that hard, but to prove this, I think the project and the few resources working on it, may want to create documents what explain how people can easily aquire the skills necessary to contribute

I am willing to be believe that there is a simple and logical explanation to do it.

So maybe a year or two from now, you will have more people contributing throught a process of training!

[blackstarr]

from the questions asked here, many of those struggle with seemingly simple tasks, like reading and writing to files, regular expressions, using a dbms engine with Perl, etc ...

That is because most of the people who come here for the 1st (or 2nd) time, are absolute beginners. After they've asked the 1st question and received advice on how to go about digging up their own answers most people spend more time researching and then only post questions much later in their learning curve.

I'm willing to bet that if someone with the relevant access took a look at an aging analysis of the number of questions monks post, broken down by their level of "sophistication" (a very subjective term, I know), you would find the following (in an almost bell-curve distribution):

1st Post: a relatively naive question, showing absolute ignorance of perl, Perl, research ability, and posting technique/etiquette.

A large proportion of 1st time posters (a la Our very own Hot Dog vendor?) will never post a second post

2nd Post: (after a delay in time ... ) something still relatively clueless, but showing more evidence of research, and posted in a style more likely to invite constructive answers.

3rd + Post: Questions which become more indicative of an understanding of programming (specifically in perl) as opposed to merely stringing disconnected language elements together.

?? ++ Post: Not merely questions, but answers, as s/he grows more proficient.

Has any such analysis been done?