On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 04:00:03PM +0900, Robert Dober wrote:
> On 3/4/07, Giles Bowkett <gilesb / gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > Those are some excellent examples of nice people who are community
> >> > leaders by dint of having created the focus of the community in the
> >> > first place.  I'm simply astounded that Larry Wall didn't make your
> >> > list, however.  He's sort of one of the pioneers of community accretion
> >> > in this tradition.
> >> >
> >> By the time I discovered Perl, it was long out of Larry Wall's hands and
> >> into the mainstream. And I never even knew about open source communities
> >> way back then. I got into Perl in the Perl 4 days as a replacement for
> >> awk. There may have been a thriving Perl community then, but I wasn't
> >> part of it.
> >
> >Larry Wall definitely still plays a role in the Perl world. At least,
> >the development of Perl 6. I was really skeptical about Perl 6 but I
> >think it's going to be very, very entertaining. (I don't know if it'll
> >be entirely useful, but I'm sure it'll be interesting.)
> At a certain moment I stopped looking at perl6, one of the reasons I
> am here BTW.
> Is Perl6 really going to happen? I would be delighted but I felt that
> the complexity/speed ratio was below the critical limit.
> Hopefully I was wrong.

I made a very flippant, fairly public prediction that we'd see something
along the lines of a release candidate for Perl 6 in about 18 months,
give or take.  The reasons I cited for such a prediction are mostly
nonsense, the prediction being mostly in jest (in a "ha ha only serious"
sense), but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I was right nonetheless.

Steve Yegge, a programming weblog pundit of growing fame, speculated
that the Next Big Language(TM) would come out in about 18 months, and I
subsequently speculated in a weblog of my own about the language he must
have meant -- and in that speculation, I identified Perl 6 as the best
fit for his criteria for the NBL.  I also went off on a tangent about
other factors related to, but not specifically part of, the NBL
discussion.  It seems likely that Yegge was actually talking about
ECMAScript 4 (don't laugh -- it's looking like a much more serious
programming language than the current iteration), though Perl 6 fits his
criteria as he stated them even better than ECMAScript 4 does.  As such,
he may well have been predicting that Perl 6 will be roughly
release-worthy in about eighteen months, too.


> 
> But someone pointed it out in this list already. "It sure would be sad
> not to have Perl6 but having Parrot alone is a great achievement
> already."

Worry not.  Perl 6 development has long since crossed the point of no
return.  Too much work has already been done, with multiple, fairly
complete testing implementations available and polished enough so that
you could be fooled into thinking you have a release version of a new
language in your hands.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary
to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990