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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.
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.
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"