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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.
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.)
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.
Its not a hoax. It handles the cgi scripts on my potato powered webserver.
Worked for me...
Here's the story (if you still can't access it):
posted by Simon on Thursday July 20, @06:12AM
from the it-goes-or-I-do dept.
Well, the Perl 6 thing was funny for a while, but I'm kinda unconvinced now. See the rest
of the article for why.
Oh, and if this isn't a joke - I quit.
OK, Perl 6 is starting to look implausible. In fact, I'm convinced it's an elaborate practical joke. Let's
examine the evidence here.
The switch to Perl 6 was determined at a closed-door meeting of Perl porters at the conference -
not on the mailing list.
The first thing that happened was that Tom Christiansen was dropped from the project. Tom's a
good friend of Larry, and they've just launched a book together. Suddenly thrown out like that? It's
not very Larry-like.
The perl6-porters mailing list was shut down with no explanation.
The 'bootstrap' mailing list - I've tried posting to it. It doesn't send them on; I asked the list
manager about this - no response.
Adam Turoff has been posting "roles" and "goals" on the bootstrap list. His mails end with this
disclaimer:
Any mistakes, errors, etc. are purely my own. Please send corrections,
clarifications or requests for clarification directly to me as to reduce
chatter on the bootstrap list.
So we're not to ask questions on the list? Come on...
Development teams will be closed-subscription lists. This is, uhm, a little different to the way
Perl works.
Here are some of the roles Ziggy posted today:
quality assurance schwern@pobox.com
spokesdroid brian@sri.net [2]
project manager gnat@frii.com [3]
customer relations dickh@activestate.com [4]
These don't look real.
Here are some of the explanations:
[2] brian d foy will work mostly behind the scenes in this role.
This role involves gathering the position of the perl6 community
and presenting it to the public in a single voice with a consistent
message.
"A single voice with a consistent message"? A Perl spin doctor?
[3] Nathan Torkington has agreed to take the role of project manager
for perl6 until he can find someone to take over.
OK so far.
This position involves controlling the release of information about
perl6, messages about the project, etc.
"Controlling the release of information"? Uhm.
Early discussions about this role mentioned the possibility of
recruiting someone with managerial experience but not necessarily
coming from a technical background or even a Perl background.
Open source projects work on a meritocracy. This has to be a joke.
[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?
'Perl 6 To Be Complete Rewrite (But Not What You Think)' Not what you think indeed.
I could go on. Let me know if this doesn't convince you.
By the way, if this is true, I'll want nothing more to do with Perl.
Tip: Sick and tired of these tips? Type "set tips 0" any time.
> set tips 0
Ner lbh sebz gur HFN? Gura lbh'ir whfg ivbyngrq gur QZPN!
)
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.
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?
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"
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.