"Lord, I was born a ramblin' man."
-- The Allman Brothers Band
And ramble I shall. The train of thought is leaving the station. Destination, unknown. This is the ride I've been taking the past couple of weeks.
Perl Virtual Filesystems. NFS. RPC. XDR. Portable floats. Portable Parrot bytecode. Portable floats, again. 64 bit support. Only having 64 bit support. Swapping x86 arbitrary data with only word-addressed, 64 bit support. Noticing that only having word-addressed, 64 bit support is rare - just the Cray vector processor, a strange beast, she. Why did I consider it in the first place? Why do we consider anything outside the norm? How much more normal is the norm since when Perl began? How much more normal will the world be by the time we get Parrot done for the non-normal machines? If no one is providing new uses for old hardware, what has changed to require a new version of Perl? Perl 6 should relegate hardware and operating systems that are unsupported today to Bastard Stepchildren status, and not code for them anymore. Where is Schwern doing his StrongARM testing? I've not specced out that hardware yet. I like hardware. Still want to get an SGI, but an Alpha is looking better and better. But OS X is still on my list, too. I wonder what's new in the journals? (If you have a text reader, it should be out of breath about now.)
All that is squeezed between work sessions, which, as those of you hanging out in #parrot know, has been coming at strange times. Speaking of work, a hearty thanks to J. Chris "Jestyr" Edillon, who's been doing my Cray and Tru64 testing for me.
Of course, I've got it all tested, but not implemented yet. What's taking so long, besides that I spend all my time writing journal entries?
I'm slow. I'm paranoid. I still suffer from perfectionism, particularly when I've little confidence. (I'm actually a pretty smart guy, but my entire life is spent surrounded by people more intelligent and more knowing than I. Mostly by choice. The Perl and Parrot circle is no different. A lot of knowledge. A lot of brainpower. It does, however, have the side effect of making me feel like an Idiot.)
Which is why I read Slashdot. Nothing like a gross of absurdly inaccurate user commentary on a subject that I actually know something about to make me feel like part of the intelligentsia.
Of course, some would say I engage in my own acts of
