At the Oslo QA Hackathon 2008, during one evening meal, it became evident that Jonathan Worthington would be able to spend even more time hacking on Rakudo Perl if he would get paid a little money for it. As Vienna.pm still has some money earmarked for Perl development, we encouraged Jonathan to send us a proposal for funding him. Which he did. And which we accepted.
So starting next week, Jonathan will work on Rakudo one full day a week (minimum of 8 hours of work), post about the work on the rakudo.org blog / use.perl.org. He will recieve € 150 per day spend working on Rakudo. We estimate that on average he will work 4 days per month. We agreed on funding three months (~ €1,800) and evalute the grant after that time. If everybody is happy, we will continue the grant until the end of 2008, where we will evaluate again (and check if we still have money left).
More info available in the WoC Wiki
Re:After lunch.
JonathanWorthington on 2008-04-23T18:04:48
Just because I'm going gray, doesn't mean I'm nearing retirement age.;-) Then, that's probably not the point you were trying to make. Actually, I'm not sure what you are getting at. Financially, I could easily earn somewhat more doing other contracting work. Heck, I could go and work on something that bored me 9-5 and earn even more. Apart from I'd rather work on stuff that interests me, and getting Perl 6 implemented and deployed interests me. If it was getting rich that I was primarily interested in, I'd not be doing this. Then, I probably wouldn't have already freely given hundreds (probably in the thousands) of man hours to the project already, either.
Funding of people working on Perl 6 makes it happen faster by allowing them to give it more time than they can in their spare evenings and weekends. There's a now pretty stable spec to implement, so the faster it can be implemented the faster we get Perl 6. It's that simple. Certainly from my point of view, a day dedicated to Perl 6 will vastly increase my productivity over doing bits here and there on an evening, when I've probably already worked a lot of hours on other projects, or on a weekend, when I'm also trying to have a life.:-)
Thanks,
JonathanRe:After lunch.
kaare on 2008-04-23T20:03:39
Just trying to show gratitude to both Vienna.pm for sponsoring you and to you for accepting working for a lot less than standard rate, for the love of Perl 6.
Perhaps a bit of cynicism over the state of Perl 6 is mixed in, now after some 10 years since the process started, but I'm impressed with the latest development. A lot of good news coming out now in a still faster rate.Re:After lunch.
Alias on 2008-04-24T06:10:43
10? Didn't it start around 2001?Re:After lunch.
kaare on 2008-04-25T07:06:46
Well, I see now that it was introduced in the State of the Onion in 2000.
I was just sure that I had a conversation at that time that discussed if Perl 6 would be ready in 2002.
Perhaps I have to move that conversation forward two years.Re:After lunch.
JonathanWorthington on 2008-04-25T23:49:23
I can understand that it's easier to be a tad more optimistic now with the rate of news that is coming out, and I can appreciate that it's felt slow and why some people have become cynical about the project.
However, it's also important to realize the reason that things are moving at the rate they are now. It's not because something magic has just happened. It's because the years up to now have been spent working on the language specification and honing it so there's a good language to implement, and building a VM and other architecture to be able to run that language on.
For example, the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler is parsing Perl 6 using Perl 6 rules. That means that a good chunk of the Perl 6 rules (regex) engine was implemented so we could do that. (You can also use that a lot in your own Perl 6 programs, compiled on Rakudo, today.) As another example, a lot of work went into the Parrot object model. That meant that implementing the OO support for Perl 6 that is in place so far didn't take long, and that there will be the possibility to inter-operate with other language's objects further down the line.
Both of these bits of work were very important for Rakudo, and have taken a lot of work to make happen. However, they're a tad harder to sell as progress than "look, now you can do X in Perl 6".:-) I can tell you first hand that getting things like inheritance and role composition working in Rakudo were a lot less work than getting Parrot to support them in the first place, so we could build Rakudo on top of them.
All that said, from my point of view it feels exciting to be "finally" working on the higher level, more visible stuff. But there's been plenty of years work going into the less sexy, less visible stuff that was needed to build it on top.
I hope this helps bring a bit of clarity to the process, anyway.
Thanks!
JonathanRe:After lunch.
chromatic on 2008-04-26T04:14:16
But there's been plenty of years work going into the less sexy, less visible stuff that was needed to build it on top.... and (to expand on Jonathan's very accurate comments) there's plenty of unsexy, invisible work remaining.
