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Perl 6 Design Minutes for 23 August 2006

brian_d_foy on 2006-09-08T23:57:00

The Perl 6 design team met via phone on 23 August 2006. Larry, Nicholas, Jesse, and chromatic attended. These are the minutes.

c:

  • working on embedding
  • should be able to check in Parrot::Embed
  • waiting on Jerry Gay's feedback from Win32
  • sort of blocking on waiting for Patrick's TGE refactorings
  • I don't have much spare time for it, but I could make time if it were ready
  • have some more thoughts on external API
  • think it needs a division between internal calls and external calls
  • think I have a good idea for coroutines and continuations

Larry:

  • don't know what I'm going to talk about yet
  • same old, same old -- something different every way
  • helping whack some of the regression testing out
  • clarifying various things
  • debating renaming metamethods to using interrogative pronouns
  • who, what, which, why, whatever
  • .ref needs a new name anyway
  • still have SOTO to push anyway

Jesse:

  • finally published the Ponie announcement
  • Mozilla Foundation wants to know how they can help Perl 6
  • how can they help?
  • assume the laws of physics still apply

Larry:

  • funding could buy me back some time
  • could spend full time on it, instead of part time
  • other than that, mostly just time-limited

Jesse:

  • what could get you to something you're comfortable calling a 6.0 spec?

Larry:

  • I think it has to continue being an interative process
  • past the user-frustration-driven model
  • different people plug in at different point
  • have dealt with most of the implementor issues
  • now the teachers are saying "I don't see how to teach this!"
  • seems to be settling down
  • we're going to asymptotically approach stable
  • seems artificial to cut off design changes on any one day
  • it'll be obvious when that day happens

Nicholas:

  • is there a way of seeing a rate of change to Synopses?

Larry:

  • the specs are starting to mutate into the documentation
  • in some ways, that's accelerating
  • we have to get out of the situation of giving deltas to Perl 5
  • it needs to document Perl 6 standalone at some point
  • difficult to disentangle that from the new changes
  • at least without making a new set of documents
  • something to say about that

Jesse:

  • what communities are next after teachers?

Larry:

  • early adopters may or may not be a new community
  • I classify p6-users as early adopter users

Nicholas:

  • have people seen Markjugg's journal?
  • he's finding Perl 6 really nice while rewriting CGI::Application from Perl 5 to Perl 6

Larry:

  • the early adopters are just starting to ramp up now
  • we'll eventually have to worry about the crossing-the-chasm people
  • have to pay ongoing attention to migration strategies
  • despite changing ponies midstream

Nicholas:

  • fundamentally, I see no reason Ponie can't work
  • provided that someone needs it enough to pay for it
  • paying for it and wanting it are two different things
  • it's long-term
  • it'll take someone brave to pay for it
  • 6 on 5 will get XS working, but things like continuations are hairy

c:

  • 80% doesn't seem too bad
  • a few global variables could be hairy
  • scope (re)entrance and exit was difficult when I tried resumable exceptions

Larry:

  • "Oops, shouldn't have closed that file."
  • just need the IO monad

Nicholas:

  • you want some dynamic things but some lexical things too there

Larry:

  • continuing into regular expressions would be nice

Mozilla Foundation helping?

Alias on 2006-09-08T12:37:53

> Mozilla Foundation wants to know how they can help Perl 6

I hear they have a lot of cash :)

(Was it something like 40 million a year from all those google searches?)

Re:Mozilla Foundation helping?

chromatic on 2006-09-08T16:39:31

The question is "Would something less than $40 million, properly applied, help Perl 6 and related projects, and if so, what and how?"

There's no single, simple, straighforward, and obviously correct answer yet. There are some ideas.

Re:Mozilla Foundation helping?

ajs on 2006-09-15T04:46:53

Here's an idea:

Hire a developer whose only goal is to aid in finishing Parrot to the point that a self-hosting Perl 6 could be a reality.

Hire another developer whose only goal is to get a self-hosting Perl 6 built on top of Pugs.

Sit them down next to eachother.

That last step is the most important. They need to be working on eachother's problems so that they don't just improve both projects, but imporove how they work together.

I'm not saying v6 isn't nice (well, right now I'm having trouble with it, but it's nice enough in the general case), but the real performance is going to come out of Parrot, and performance is one of those things early adopters will look at closely.

Re:Mozilla Foundation helping?

chromatic on 2006-09-15T16:43:51

Question: who are these two developers?