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
