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Postings from February 2007
On 2/3/07, Michael G Schwern <schwern@gmail.com> wrote: > Perl 6 is happening. There's running code. There's a considerable test suite. The performance is shaping up. Even Perl 5 compatibility is being dealt with. If people don't know this and think its all a wanking exercise... well, that's a PR problem not a code problem. > Well, not long ago I was curious to know what was going on, so I took a look at the front page here: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ which says that for news of Perl 6, go to the list summaries page here: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/ but nothing has been updated there in almost a year. My first thought was that after hearing about so many problems for so many years, I was finally seeing the dreaded signs that Perl 6 had been cancelled. But wait, there's a link in the left column called "Status," so I click on that and get to: http://dev.perl.org/perl6/status.html which tells me nothing more recent than, "The community brainstorming process finished August 1, 2000," and points me back at the same defunct list summaries page. Now quite eager to find out what the death blow was, I delve into the individual list archives at nntp.perl.org and discover that in fact Perl 6 list summaries are still being produced and posted to perl6-announce, so I quickly scan the latest three or four list summaries to try to get a sense of where the project is. Great news -- lots of stuff is going on. But much of it is not anything that using Perl 5 for 10 years gives me the basis to understand, and most of it is dominated by perl6-internals, just as it was five years ago. The language list is still trying to decide whether math should be done in floating point or integer and debating whether something that sounds like a multi-dimensional array slice can be supported. Is this a language I can use in production this year or next? It doesn't sound like it. Is it really the future of Perl, and is it solid enough that I should spread myself even thinner and try to contribute to porting it? Dunno, and can't easily see how to find out. I'm only slightly less dense and uninformed than I've implied here, or in other words, there is a little exaggeration in what I've said, but very little. The list summaries are written by insiders for insiders, and there's nothing wrong with that, but when a non-maintained mirror of them is presented as the primary source of project status, that's not a PR problem, that's a PR wormhole that sucks potentially interested parties off into other galaxies where you will never see them again.