Slashdot Mirror
Unhappiness Surrounding Perl 6 Announcements
eponymous poltroon writes "On SourceTalk, Simon makes a good case for the news about Perl 6 being a well-managed hoax. " That's his best case scenario: he outlines the major issues surrounding the recent structural changes announced to coincide with Perl 6's development.
The problem is you weren't trying to post the truth. First, there are many languages more poorly-designed than Perl. Second, if you were intending that post as anything besides flamebait, you would have supported the claim that Perl is badly designed by saying, oh, "hidden context dependencies lead to horribly unreadable code", or some such fact.
Note: I love Perl, but I understand that other people may not love Perl. But it's not fair to say "Perl Sux!" without having anything to back it up. I also didn't list any languages more poorly-designed than Perl because I didn't feel like following my second point.
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"The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world."
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
From the article:
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[4] Dick Hardt's role for perl6 will be to talk to customers with a significant interest in Perl's stability and growth (e.g. Yahoo investment banks, etc.) and forward these concerns to the perl6 community.
"Investment banks" is a giveaway. It's so amazingly well contrived, it almost makes you forget that Perl doesn't have customers, it has users. Do you see a mention of the Perl user groups there? Does this sound like Larry with a concern for the community?
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Working for a major wall street firm, perl is widely used by us, and generally in ways that potentially have a large financial impact (like running a trading book.) When a lot of money is on the line, you can bet people get really interested in the stability of a product (even one you didn't "pay" for; this is wall street after all, what you save in costs ends up as more profits, and that has a direct impact on your annual comp.) At least this part of that article seems reasonable to me...
(Investment banking is kind of a misnomer, in that it represents only a portion of what a global financial services firm does - which also includes broker/dealer activities, proprietary trading, investment management, and various more traditional banking services as well.)
I'll damn well sit up and listen if simon (*this* simon) says he wants nothing to do with further perl development. perl would be losing a damn good hacker in that case.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
Think about it for a second: this is the way that "real" news agencies function in the "real world". Most news boils down to a couple of talking heads getting their soundbites propagated to a mass of news consumers. This necessarily must be the way that sites like /. do their thing, because the free software community is nothing more than a swirling mass of opinionated posts, heated discussions, and flameage. Somehow, miraculously, a little code gets written in the process -- but news regarding architectural plans and project-management plans doesn't have much code to go on -- the opinionated posts are the news in this case. If you think that a news agency isn't providing the information that you would like to consume, you are free to abstain. Better yet, provide a competing news service. Kernel Traffic is an excellent model (I prefer it to /.) but it lacks the entertainment of pedantic posts like mine explaining that journalism is nothing more than a trade: this concept of "journalistic status" is a holdover from the days when people were foolish enough to think of it as a 4th branch of government. In reality, it's just a business of shuffling tasty bits to consumers.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Maybe if you and the others who posted to that story didn't bother to read Cmdr Taco's intro to the story:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday July 20, @08:15AM
from the but-think-of-the-alternatives dept.
alessio writes: "On the front page of Linux Weekly News there is a report from the Ottawa Linux Symposium where the adorable Miguel de Icaza supposedly states that Unix has been built wrong from the ground up." It's actually a pretty cool interview, and as always, Miguel makes his point without any candy coating! The major point is the lack of reusable code between major applications (a major problem that both KDE and GNOME have been striving to fix for some time now).
Seems to me like he explained pretty well what it was about plus "Unix Sucks" was what Miguel's seminar was entitled. So what is your problem?
PS: About the the fact that slashdot publishes links to opinions on webboards...isn't that what people read slashdot for? Major Linux and Perl were made and are made not with press releases but via discussions on USENET and webboards.
PPS: Slashdot posts stories submitted by readers. The headlines are not picked by slashdot authors but instead are the ones that the readers submitted the stories with (I know because 5 or 6 of my submissions have been posted). If you want to blame someone for the sensationalistic headlines, blame the readers who spice up the headlines so that there is a greater chance their stories are read by the editors and submitted.
The *real* link is here.
Or install a C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS list (not sure whatcha Linux users call it). Not file extension on this one. All the following addresses will be resolved to an invalid address, so you won't be bothered by banners in the least.
Also recommend using Opera v4x, which has superb cookie handling (far better than MSIE!) and other excellent privacy features.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
They have been "slashdotting" themselves for years. Why not pass on the heritage and tradition.
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Dick Hardt's role for perl6 will be to...(blah blah blah)
Dick Hardt's?
From Holden?
**>>BELCH
The FSF Perl/TCL/etc replacement?
What are you talking about? I have a potato powered web server. :-)
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Perl needs a spin doctor to fight the FUD spawned by anti-Perl bigots of various persuasions.
This has got to be one of the most interesting things I've read all week. perl became popular by word-of-mouth, and it's always tried to stand on its own merits. That's something I've always admired about it -- it's just real that way.
But on the other hand, a lot of users who might benefit from perl are getting turned off by a lot of uninformed hearsay. Maybe we perl users do need an advocate, much as linux users need Eric Raymond. I find the thought somewhat distasteful, but I just don't know...
Perhaps it's time to change the name to "Slashdot: Advocacy for Open Source and the death of Intellectual Property, Think Like Us"
By definition all communitites think alike. That's how you basically define a community in the modern age (i.e the internet).
If you want a bunch of people who hate unix go hang out at mucrosoft.public.whatever newsgroups. Go to comp.databases.ms-access and post something about oracle and see what happens. Go to fawcette publications web boards and say the word delphi you'll be flamed out of existance.
The beauty of the internet is that you can hang out with people interested in the same thing as you no matter where you live and that no matter how obscure your interest is you'll likely find enough people to communicate with. If you don't like what is being said here please by all means go away and find some people who think like you. I have suggested several places where you can discuss your distaste for linux, perl, python or even slashdot I am sure there are billions of others.
Whatever you do please get off your sanctimonious ass and stop whining.
War is necrophilia.
Well, COBOL was hardly the last. Ada was designed by committees and, of course, most languages end up being redesigned (standardized) by committees.
Actually, you CAN run a webserver on a potato. :)
/azure khan/
For all those that missed it the first time
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
However, every now and again they claim some sort of journalistic status (check the story on cnet buying zdnet), and that claim becomes more absurd with every passing day.
Yeah, but they've got jon katz... JON F-ING KATZ... so they're journalists.
i mean, he writes for rolling stone... ROLLING F-ING STONE... so he must be a journalist.
the hordes need to be fed... if they're not sated, they get cranky. this kind of crap apparently makes the readers happy...
if all usenet flamewars end with nazi comparisions, how do flamewars with nazis end?
"you're just like a nazi"
"I am a nazi"
"oh."
Are debian related. I am fairly sure that Debian's perl packagers thought people would never use the CPAN module. I swear, once it upgraded Perl to 5.6.0, leaving the existing perl modules and libraries in debian filesystem hell (I don't care what it's compliant with), things were never the same. Anyway, that's my bitch for the day :).
BTW, the CPAN module itself is great. To camel newbies, after you set up "perl -MCPAN -e shell", installing new modules is a snap...
Sometimes, we still must use the source, Luke...
Yes, yes, I do realize it's a joke. However, it's funny, and you can't let people miss out on good stuff like that.
/azure khan/
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
Second, and more importantly - with the information I had at the time, I honestly completely believed the Perl 6 thingy to be a joke. That's how it looked to me from the outside. It's not, and now I just look foolish.
If I'd been at Monterey, perhaps I'd have had a clearer understanding of what was going on - I was acting on a mixture of second-hand stories and emotion. Now Chip and Nat have explained it to me, the picture is slightly different.
I don't know what I'm going to do about Perl 6. Maybe I'll work on it, maybe I won't. At this stage, I'm not particularly happy with the way it's going, but the details haven't been decided yet.
Rewriting Perl 6 from scratch is an unbelievably Good Thing, and it's something I'm very, very eager to get my teeth into. But I'll have to watch what happens to the community; at the moment, I don't like the new development model. That's not a fault of the development model, or a fault of me. Different strokes for different folks.
I made the mistake of judging too early - try not to do that yourself.
What about Algol 60? I think reading it was also designed by a committee. It came out (as the name suggests) sometime in 1960 or 1961.
Wow! A Perl Sux flame with Perl spelt correctly (ie. not Pearl). Must be a first!
Slashdot is interested in getting people worked up because when people are worked up, they post a larger number of interesting comments. In theory.
Which, of course, translates into a higher number of page/banner views. Not only by the people waging the flamewar, but by the thousands of observers.
They probably see a revenue spike whenever a 1000-comment article gets postes. Can you really blame them? After all, they're just doing the good ol stimulus response dance. No point in being any better than that...
Just as another testimony, my primary client is a large regional bank and over the last 2 years I have replaced most of their Lotus Notes intranet software with Perl CGI/Apache/OpenLDAP. They and we have a significant investment in Perl. A joke about Perl 6 would not be a joke and I doubt it very serously.
/. over reaction.
This looks like another
BTW: It looks like the Microsoft guys are catching on. If you open source hackers want to let Seattle make you look like a bunch of socializers, be my guest. I've been doing Perl consulting pretty solidly since before Perl5 and I'm shifting a lot of my resources to Javascript in part because of what I see happening with Perl vs Javascript as exemplified by Perl6 vs JScript 5.5.
I guess this is to be expected, with Larry getting beleagured by all the attention.
C++? Well, they didn't pick Java, I'll give them that much... but it looks like now its only a matter of time before the Perl porters hop on the Gravy Train Wreck(tm) that is Java.
It's a cryin' shame. I really like Perl.
Ah well, life goes on -- it always does -- until it doesn't -- but then you knew that...
Seastead this.
Because they have completely opposite philosophies, but are often competing for very similar application domains. People think of Perl as the language for handy little quick-and-dirty scripts, but personally, I reach for Python and don't find it to be at all inferior. What really makes both of these languages effective for this purpose is the rich set of freely-available library modules that each has.
Don't take this to mean that I think Python is only appropriate for quick-and-dirty stuff, though - I've found that the process of transforming one of my quick Python hacks into a more powerful generalized tool goes quite smoothly...
Who's Jon Katz?
Oh, wait: do you mean that guy that I filtered out?
The only thing I ask is that it run identically on MacOS, Windoze and *NIX (the three platforms we use). Beyond that, I put my faith in the developers.
Yeah but Simon's quite a good hacker. He seems to have a genuine and deeply-rooted clue about technical matters, at least to me.
There is no Perl Cabal, and I am not part of it. :-)
In what possible sense to BSD's have a "closed" deveopment model? The source code is freely available for reading (via cvs), trusted developers can write directly to the repository and unknown developers can submit patches which are included based on their merit.
What project is more "open" than this?
Not Found /articles/00/07/20/1117233.shtml was not found on this server.
The requested URL
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Its not a hoax. It handles the cgi scripts on my potato powered webserver.
would they want to hoax this. Its not like its 1st April...
:-)
Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T out to get me
Its working now...
Not even 10 minutes and it's been slashdotted. And by a broken link!
--
Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
if (ismoderator(reader)) hidemessage(this);
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
)
Its not a hoax. It handles the cgi scripts on my potato powered webserver.
Though you can run Linux on an ear of corn, thanks to all the kernels.
ba-dum-dump!
I kill myself
George
This is a hoax. The reality has been leaked millions of times here on slashdot. Here are the real plans for Larry Well's rewrite of Perl.
Algol68 would have been a better, more recent, example; certainly less successful and IMO less usable. But ADA was another even more recent, and one that actually functions.
After you check out the link to the story, please take a moment to read Chip Salzenberg's response. I reproduce it in its entirety here, as it's relatively brief, well-worded, and the server is slammed eight ways from sunday just now:
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Slashdot is interested in getting people worked up because when people are worked up, they post a larger number of interesting comments. In theory.
As for Miguel's talk, I went to his talk at the Linux Expo in London a couple of weeks ago, and it was definitely titled 'Unix Sucks'. I imagine the talk at Ottawa was the same. (Unix sucks because there is no code reuse and not enough consistency between different programs, according to Miguel.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
mmm, but what about Java? It was not designed by a comitee? If COBOL was the last language designed by the comitee, and if it was in the 50s, does it means it was the only computer language ever designed by a comitee?
Well, COBOL was hardly a language at all...
--
Cause she's the cheese and Im the macaroni
-- .
If your tired of downloading adverts on Slashdot and elsewhere, then do yourself a favour and install junkbuster. It's a little proxy that sits in between your browser and the web, filtering adverts based on regular expressions. It also selectively blocks the reading and/or writing of cookies.
On my piss-poor 33.6K modem at home it makes the web a much more bearable proposition. Check out the junkbuster at:
http://www.junkbuster.com/
Don't worry about the ".com" suffix, it's available under the GPL.
Chris
Don't forget it is also a business of power. To say that "journalists" never spread FUD is quite naive. At least we are given a forum for discussion here at /. even if the S/N ratios suffer a bit. I'd take a bit of noise anyday for a tiny bit of unique signal.
*gel
Huh? What the hell? /. to use the same title and then explain what they mean by it? wtf??
/. posted. Or, the link
So it's OK for Miguel to use that title, and then explain what he means by it, but it's not ok for
For the lazy - here is the full article that
alessio writes: "On the front page of Linux Weekly News there is a report from the Ottawa Linux Symposium where the adorable Miguel de Icaza supposedly states that Unix has been built wrong from the ground up." It's actually a pretty cool interview, and as always, Miguel makes his point without any candy coating! The major point is the lack of reusable code between major applications (a major problem that both KDE and GNOME have been striving to fix for some time now).
So, has been built wrong from the ground up, lack of reusable code etc (all stuff the Miguel said) is an inflamatory or innapropriate article?
Slashdot is no worse or better than traditional media for the title of the article. It is designed to be catchy, so that you read further.
Designed by Microsoft!
.NET. Network enabling your OS from start to finish, without bothering to design any security into it.
Ba-dump!
For instance their latest initiative,
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
The plans are here.
-Stephen
The Handbook of Programming Languages has to say the following:
Michael B. Feldman: Ada 95 in Context, in: Peter H. Salus (Ed.): Handbook of Programming Languages, Vol. I, Object-Oriented Programming Languages. MacMillian, 1998, pp. 561.The Topaz project chose C++ instead (which is probably fine) however the reason they gave for dropping Ada off the candidate list was due to bootstrapping worries which were, in my view, unfounded now that we have GNAT (also see this). I hope they reconsider.
From a project standpoint of view, I think Ada is a very good choice. (And so would Eiffel be, IMO). However, one of the features of Perl is that Perl runs almost everywhere. GNAT is build on top of gcc, IIRC, and gcc doesn't run on all the platforms Perl runs on (the actual number of different platforms Perl runs on is unknown). Of course there are other Ada compilers, but I fear that Perl written in Ada means certain platforms will be locked out. And that is a price not everyone is willing to pay. The link you provided suggest GNAT only runs on 3 platforms, Linux, DOS, and SCO. There is also a GNAT homepage, which shows it's run on more platforms.
-- Abigail
I think it comes down to two different ways that people think and create. Those (like me) who find Perl to be intuitive and graceful are the people who picture a large working system, and then dive down to the lowest level of detail to begin implimenting it in a sort of fugue, where many small details may intersect and become larger modules.
Python programmers appear to me to be people who see a large system as a collection of modules (or objects) from the start and who will then begin to impliment those modules in a relatively serial fashion.
Does this mean that one is better than the other? Of course not, but I do think that having a language that addresses both sets of people is either a challenge of a higher order than the already herculean task of writing a good programming language, or is impossible. Once you get past the simple arguments of white space vs. dollar signs, you Python and Perl are not that different. I would cite the following ways in which they do differ a strengths and weaknesses of BOTH languages:
Overall, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what the other camp wants and is doing....
The info on the GNAT homepage is true with some modifications. For example, GNAT runs on Solaris according to the GNAT homepage. It doesn't on our Solaris system because of a security option.
A very basic security measure on any Solaris system is to turn stack execution off. A jump to code on the stack will generate an error (and a log entry :-) and the program will stop. That drastically limits the effects of buffer overflows, since code cannot be planted in a buffer on the stack and then executed.
For some bizarre reason, GNAT generates code that always executes on the stack. Run a Solaris system with stack execution disabled, and *bang* no GNAT application will run either. Ever. Run a Solaris system with stack execution enabled (and, thus, leave yourself much more vulnerable to a gazillion buffer overflow exploits), and GNAT will work.
The interesting question is, of course, why on earth GNAT generates code that executes on the stack. GCC doesn't. No other compiler I've come across does.
My point? GNAT support is limited. I certainly wouldn't use GNAT for anything I wanted to distribute widely. And that's quite sad, because Ada is, in spite of its voluminous syntax, actually a great language for really huge projects.
In what possible sense to BSD's have a "closed" deveopment model?
I'm speaking from an OpenBSD/NetBSD perspective here, but I am reasonably confident that FreeBSD development is managed in the same way. The development model is "closed" in the sense that a cabal known as `the core' direct work on the kernel, and administer CVS access. This is more like a corporate development model than say Linux development. In fact Linux development is often termed a `benevolent dictatatorship' with Linus Torvalds in charge.
I certainly think that the *BSD way has some advantages - a more easily recognised controlling authority, and more centralised project planning. While this may sometimes hinder a true meritocracy (see the OpenBSD/NetBSD feud), this isn't any better in the Linux world (see the recent fracas between Hans Rieser and Alan Cox).
For a rewrite of Perl, some decisive steps need to be taken - and a more closed development model during the early stages could be beneficial.
Chris
A somewhat misinformed dude on the net is somewhat upset about a recent announcement. That's not news, that happens a million times a day on the net! It's certainly not newsworthy.
Anybody who had been paying any attention to Topaz wasn't very suprised by the announcement. And it's been clear to me that the p5p mailing list has had far too much needless personality conflict on it in the recent past. Several noted and valuable developers dropped off the list because of such conflicts. Something new is needed.
Perl 6 may be strange and new, but it's a good thing, not something to fear.
I hope it isn't a hoax that Larry and the team want to rewrite Perl - it's internals are a mess at the moment. There has been a number of discussions about Perl 6 before, most notably the idea of using C++ - so if this is a hoax it is a long standing one.
As for the 'closed' planning stage (not coding - the Larry Wall statement simply mentions laying the foundations for Perl 6) - this makes sense. Allowing anyone to put in their tuppence worth as to how Perl should progress isn't best handled on one mailing list. I assume other forums would be used to solicit general feedback.
The closed development model seems to suit other projects well - the *BSD's being the most notable ones - so don't dismiss it out of hand for Perl.
Chris
" by chip (chip@valinux.com) on Thursday July 20, @06:10PM EST
I was there. Here are the facts as I remember them:
The only things actually decided at the ``closed-door'' meeting (actually we had a visitor and we didn't throw him out) were [1] that a rewrite could be attempted; [2] that it didn't have to be 100% compatible; [3] that one big list like p5p can't support such a large developer population.
Tom C. hasn't been excommunicated or anything, any more than I have. (I'm not on the list either, you notice.) Tom C. left the meeting soon after it started, so he wasn't around to volunteer when the chairs were being assigned. We shut down p6p because we don't want another p5p shark tank. The bootstrap mailing list works; I know that people have been using it. It's only a temporary list, anyway; that's why it has that name. Some (not all, I think) development lists will be closed, also to avoid the p5p-alike fate. The assignment list is real. I can't help what seems real to you.
Perl needs a spin doctor to fight the FUD spawned by anti-Perl bigots of various persuasions.
Meritocracy means that promotions go by ability. What makes you think that only the ability to code is the exclusive measure of ability that should matter? Management is, contrary to popular opinion, a real skill that some people have more of than others.
We already do hear from the community. They use mail and news and Slashdot and use Perl. But the non-traditional-hacker user base doesn't communicate through those channels. Consider Dick Hardt our ``speaker to suits''. As for your participation, well, you're welcome to stay."
People getting a little antsy to denounce stuff?
The original poster's link is incorrect. The real plans are here.
Ada was designed by committees
Excuse me, but Ada was not designed by committee. There was a large requirements gathering process, but the design of the language was by a small tightly focussed design team led by Tucker S. Taft at Intermetrics who had final say, and used it.
For what it's worth, Larry Wall publically said that Ada might be a good choice for the Perl6 implementation language.
The Topaz project chose C++ instead (which is probably fine) however the reason they gave for dropping Ada off the candidate list was due to bootstrapping worries which were, in my view, unfounded now that we have GNAT (also see this). I hope they reconsider.
Also do not forget, it's "Ada" not "ADA". ADA is the American Dental Association, whereas Ada is a language named after Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, world's first programmer, thanks!
Chris Morgan
Is it just me, or does this headline seem like some sort of failled Haiku attempt?
Due to some pressures from the open source community Larry Wall has chnged the name of Perl to Perl# and has decided to make it a web-based only language. Larry was quoted as saying "The web is the development language"
Try ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/bina ry-i386/web/apache_1.3.9-13.1.deb
--
Niklas Nordebo | nino at sonox.com | +46-708-405095
Just as all usenet flamewars end when someone is compared to a Nazi, all Slashdot threads end upon the invocation of goatse.cx
My point? Perl 6 won't please everyone. If it tries, it's going to turn into a giant hunk of bat guano. If you don't like Perl 6, stick to 5. If you hate Perl, use something else.