Since I was getting nowhere with the efforts with the journalizer (except for a bit more thought concerning the actual underlying code, which I'll get to in a moment), I decided to take up googling to find out what chip was talking about in his seminal journal post...specifically, Jon Orwant's crockery-hurling.
Well, I found what I was looking for, along with a PDF outlining major design decisions concerning Perl 6 (not current, though, I think; I seem to remember one of the Apocalypses contradicting parts of the list). So I read the whole damn thing.
I still think it's a good idea on the whole. (Yes, I'm aware that I'm a whippersnapper and not Possessed Of Great Perl History and all. These are mere opinions; feel free to debate them, disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer, etc.) This strikes me as something that lots of other designers in lots of other fields don't generally have the chutzpah to do -- admit that certain things looked good at first, but haven't worked out all that well, and perhaps they were mistakes after all.
I was also painfully reminded of what I liked so much about Perl in the first place -- it resembles a language I adore to death, English. Not necessarily in the concept of being readable to an English-speaking person, but in the sense that there's very little basic idiom that cannot be described as being like some aspect of English. When I started reading through the neat little linguistic things that Larry had sprinkled throughout Perl syntax, I knew I wanted to know Perl inside and out.
It seemed like a twisted second language (in the linguistic sense, not the CS sense) to learn, instead of Japanese (which I still tell myself I should learn someday, but, as a cheap t-shirt will tell you: "I am so far behind on all the things I have to do that, at this rate, I will never die.")
It still does. I have yet to wake up and say to myself, "Well, that's it for Perl, then." I've yet to even wake up and say, "Well, that's it for all the Perl I need, then." I suspect that -- even if I limit myself to Perl 5.6.1 only -- I'd never quite get everything.
This is why I've made a decision for the time being, and it's probably fairly sound, since the Perl 6 design process is going slower than molasses. (With the understanding that what Perl 6 is trying to be is going to take a damn long time, and should, or else it'll get screwed up.) My decision is that I'm not going to try to learn Perl 6 until at least 2006.
Maybe that's a little harsh. Decisions are always prone to redecisions. Perl 6 might not come out until 2008, or it might come out in 2004 and somehow, against all odds, replace Perl 5 in 75% of production settings or somesuch. It could happen. Hell, the Earth could crash into the Sun tomorrow, too. It's not impossible, just unlikely. I'm just saying that, right now, it appears that I will be learning Python, Ruby, and Haskell long before I start delving into Perl 6.
Could be worse. I could have listened to my advisor and taken that COBOL class he tried to foist upon me.
Anyway, as far as the Journalizer goes: I'm starting to think that WWW::UsePerl::Journal doesn't go in the direction the Journalizer needs. (Well, I don't see any real reason it couldn't, but I'd have to submit some extensions to it and get them applied. I don't want to assume, right now, that I could do that.) It looks like I can write code that will return the appropriate data structures I need concerning specific entries, and to fetch a selected entry.
Tomorrow's going to be a non-code day. Work, then I've got to write a Fifty/Fifty, then I've got to sleep or some such nonsense. Really, "sleep"! It sounds so absurd when I say it out loud... ;)
