RFC: Community education page
David K Storrs
nameless unless he chooses to identify himself). He made the
following observation:
> Every time we're lambasted for how long Perl 6 is taking I remind
> myself that Short Term Thinking is the norm now.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this lambasting, and the
more important (and remediable) one is lack of education on the part
of the baster. They don't understand :
(A) how hard it is to design a language; and,
(B) how much progress really has been made.
I'd like to propose that there be a single web page (or maybe a small
wiki, but one page might be preferable) somewhere that could be
pointed at to show just how much has been done. It could list all
the CPAN modules in the Bundle::Perl6 module (are those all Perl6
modules explicitly or are some of them support framework?), all the
sites where Pugs has been deployed in production (I gather there are
some?), any non-toy / non-arcane projects that are being worked on in
Perl6, etc. I suppose it could also list the various language
implementations that are targetting Parrot, but that's much less
impressive to the common hacker who just wants to get work done, and
not terribly relevant to the question "Why is __Perl6__ taking time?".
Also, the page should talk about why it is difficult to do what is
being done. Ask the reader questions: "You want to <support
continuations / have coroutines / embedd yacc in your language /
whatever>. How do you do it?" Then offer up an analysis of various
design choices that were considered and rejected and why. In
particular, since the average person probably thought of the naïve
answer, shoot big holes in that one. That way they sit up and say
"Oh. Hmm, I guess this really is kinda hard."
I see this as a small effort towards community outreach, where
"community" is both the existing Perl people and the wider Internet.
I volunteer to create the page, host it, and maintain it, but I would
need help gathering the information in the first place. And if the
Perl6 community doesn't think it's a good idea, then I won't bother.
Comments?
--Dks
ja...@mastros.biz
> Also, the page should talk about why it is difficult to do what is
> being done. Ask the reader questions: "You want to <support
> continuations / have coroutines / embedd yacc in your language /
> whatever>. How do you do it?" Then offer up an analysis of various
> design choices that were considered and rejected and why.
outside the perl6 project, looking at it, and wondering what's taking so
long, but also people on the semi-inside, trying to remember things like
"I'm sure there's a reason other then C<< if condition_without_parens
{block} >> that we can't have C<< %foo {'bar'} >> DTRT, but I can't
remember it", which certianly happens to me fairly often.
Also, as a checklist for proposals. If you're thinking of proposing
something, go look there. If it's already there, do you have any new pros
to put against the existing cons?
-=- James Mastros
David K Storrs
That's an advantage I hadn't thought of.
We'd have to be careful to keep it brief, though. The whole point is
that this is supposed to be a single page that can be read in a
reasonable period of time (~10 mins). It's supposed to answer one
question: "Why should I still be excited about Perl6 even though
it's taking longer than was expected?", not a horde of questions like
"why were coroutines implemented that way?" and such.
--Dks
Paul Johnson
> but also people on the semi-inside, trying to remember things like
> "I'm sure there's a reason other then C<< if condition_without_parens
> {block} >> that we can't have C<< %foo {'bar'} >> DTRT, but I can't
> remember it", which certianly happens to me fairly often.
Well, I'd obviously quite like that ;-)
--
Paul Johnson - pa...@pjcj.net
http://www.pjcj.net
Juerd
it would be great if someone wrote usable wiki software (with revision
control support) in Perl 6, and could maintain it so that it keeps up
with Pugs. Because of the current state of Pugs, it will have to be
written in a very simple way.
Especially if it looks great on the outside, this will do Perl 6 much
good.
I've been meaning to do this myself, but I'm past the point where I give
up waiting for sufficient sufficiently round tuits.
Of course, feather can host it :)
Juerd
--
http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html
http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html
http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
David K Storrs
imagination among the Perl6 crowd. Let me ask something a little
more concrete and see if that gets us to ignition, otherwise it's
probably not feasible.
Assume that I'm going to create, host, and maintain a small website
that explains where Perl6 stands and how it got there. The message
of this site is essentially marketing (oh no, he used the "M-
word"!!!). The message is:
- We are a serious project, not a toy or a research effort
- We can be counted on to release a 1.0 in a reasonable timeframe,
- We can solve real problems in ways that are better than anything
else out there
Here are some questions I would need help answering (many of them are
restatements of each other):
- Why are we creating a new language?
- Why should people be interested in Perl6 when (Python | Ruby | Java
| C# | $other_language) already exists and probably fills their needs?
- What are the major new features that we want to include?
- Continuations
- Coroutines
- Redefinable language grammars
- Regexen that are a grammar as opposed to a minilanguage
- MMD
- Junctions
- ???
- Why do we want each of these features, beyond "Because it's shiny"?
- Having any one of the above features would probably be a good
thing. Is there extra leverage to getting 2+ of them in
combination? E.g. does all(continuations, MMD) give you a >2x
multiplier in terms of any(expressiveness, power, Anything) over just
one(contininuations, MMD)?
- The initial estimate for how long it would take was "one year for
design, 2-3 years for implementation". We're now at five years and
still doing design. What happened?
- Why should people regard us as anything other than vaporware?
- What real, useful projects are being done in Perl6 right now?
- What real, useful *commercial* projects are being done in Perl6
right now?
- Other questions that might be useful?
--Dks
Doug McNutt
>Hmmm...This doesn't seem to have particularly grabbed the popular imagination among the Perl6 crowd.
I'm a lurker here, mostly interested in keeping perl 6 usable for mathematics and physics, but unable to keep up with most of the things I read.
What I KNOW about perl 6 comes from "Perl 6 Essentials" First Edition, June 2003. That's how I got here. The >>+<< "vector" operators were giving me fits.
I suspect there are copyright issues but an O'Reilly style "bookshelf" in an open source way that would provide continuous updates to Essentials would really be nice. I occasionally try to understand a thread by looking there but, at 3 years old, it rarely does any good.
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