Re: Production Perl6 in early 2010?

[moritz]

s/Perl6/Parrot/ please.

Don't make the mistake to confuse Parrot (a general purpose virtual machine, designed for dynamic programming languages) with Perl 6 (a language specification with multiple, incomplete implementations) or with Rakudo (a Perl 6 compiler that compiles to parrot byte code, and lives the parrot repository).

I think that the time line for parrot is quite realistic, although I wouldn't place a bet on the exact dates.

For Perl 6 and Rakudo it's much harder to say, because some parts of the language aren't all that well specified (for example concurrency), so nobody can tell how much effort both specification and implementation will be.

[assemble]

Why?

Production Perl 6, as I take it, refers to a production usable Perl 6 implementation. Just because the first one may be Parrot/Rakudo doesn't make the statement "Production Perl 6" invalid. Most people couldn't care less about obscure project names vs. what language they implement.

[moritz]

It's not wrong, but very misleading.

The announcement of the parrot road map has nothing to do with the release date of Perl 6 (which by itself isn't well defined - do you mean the language specification? or the first implementation?).

"production parrot" does not imply "production rakudo".

If you link to one thing and ask a completely different question at the same time, one could suspect that you think the two are related, which is why I answered to clean up any possible confusion.

Most people couldn't care less about obscure project names vs. what language they implement.

If you count all people in the world, yes. If you count Perl programmers, no.

Most Perl programmers are interested in parrot because it started off as a platform for implementing Perl 6, not because it's in general a very cool project. So for them it does matter to know that a production parrot doesn't imply production Perl 6.

As for the "obscure project names" - most people are more confused if different things have the same name. Now different things (language, compiler, vm, test suite) have different names, which I find not confusing at all. I don't care if you call them "obscure", I can remember them and type them without my fingers, so I'm fine with them.

[assemble]

I see. I kind of figured if you had production parrot it would imply production rakudo. I guess I was wrong. I do see your point on why that needs clarified.

But I don't see your point on why it is good to call the different parts completely different names. I'm fine with calling things the "Perl compiler", "Perl interpreter" or "Perl VM". It's the same naming method as every other language I know. When you run it with just one command it really doesn't make sense. Right now, I type perl somescript.pl and I only deal with one program.

I'll admit that I haven't kept up well with Perl 6, but I'd be surprised, and somewhat disappointed, if it's any harder to use than rakudo somescript.pl or whatever the program I see eventually winds up being called. I didn't think we would have to do something like perlc stuff.pl; perl stuff

So yes, they are different pieces and can't be talked about the same, and that makes sense. But in the end it'll all be Perl6.

[xiaoyafeng]

IMHO, s/Production/usable/ other than s/Perl6/Parrot/ would be better.

[moritz]

It is usable right now (for some values of "usable", but certainly sufficiently usable for mod_parrot, a nearly feature complete lua implementation, Rakudo and TCL).