I wrote zero lines of code these past two days. It was a glorious stretch of uninterrupted free time where I could clean up a few grotty bits of Parrot and add a few features that will help us get Perl 6 out the door that much sooner.
Then came Where is Perl 6? The question that won't die and now, my personal tipping point, Why Perl 6 needs to be deemphasized and renamed.
Merry Christmas. What a great time to take a dump on the projects of others. (Funny, I thought the traditional 20th anniversary gift was china, not implications that you've given up the moral right to name things you created and still work on.)
Sometime at a conference, remind me to introduce Andy to a few people he could ask about the status of Perl 6. I bet I could even help him check out Parrot on his laptop such that he could type cd languages/perl6/ and make test and see for himself how things are. (This paragraph ought to push the Schwern sarcast-o-meter way past red.)
Re:if you weren't sour enough already
rjbs on 2007-12-28T12:25:26
Wow, clearly I misread your original post and thought you'd linked to something else.
Whatever, it's still obnoxious.
It's not about me, it's about everyone else. I'm not the one asking where it's at, because I know the "it'll be done when it's done answer." It's for everyone else. It's for the guys at the Linux user group meeting I went to last night who when they heard I used Perl immediately asked "When is Perl 6 coming out?"
Why is it so awful that people want to know what's going on, without having to check out a source tree and read through arcane documents?
Re:I could, sure...
brian_d_foy on 2007-12-28T17:04:31
It's not that people ask the questions, it's that they don't bother to find out. It's not a question they really care about enough to google.
And, apparently, it's a question you don't have a good answer to. You don't need to know about deadlines and project charts to distill into a couple of sentences what the Perl 6 team says over and over again. People seemed satisfied with the answers I give to the same question. Why you can't do the same is boggling.
I think you're just interested in stirring the shit, though.Re:I could, sure...
petdance on 2007-12-28T17:14:09
It's not a question they really care about enough to google.There is no answer to "When is Perl 6 coming out" that is more than "It'll be done when it's done," Googleable or not.
I don't want a date. I want something more than "It'll be done when it's done." Somewhere between declaring a day on the calendar, and saying "Uh, hell, I dunno", there's a middle ground. That's what I want.
Why you can't do the same is boggling.
Because nobody I've ever given the answer of "It'll be done when it's done" is satisfied with it. I get sneers and snickers and "Oh, when Duke Nukem Forever is done, right?"
Because when I give that answer to book publishers who write to the TPF address asking what's up with Perl 6, the answer I give is not one that they can make any sort of useful decisions on.
Because when I go to Perl Mongers or other user groups meetings in other cities, it is the #1 question I am asked. People WANT to use Perl 6.
I think you're just interested in stirring the shit, though.
You are mistaken. I do, however, want to shine the light on it.
Re:I could, sure...
brian_d_foy on 2007-12-28T18:31:04
If "It will be done when it's done" isn't a satisfying answer, stop giving it. You think you're a smart guy, so look at the information and come up with the real answer. I've just posted my talking points. I don't have the same trouble you do, apparently. If you want to claim to be the PR guy, you need to be the person to take all the information and distill it for the public, not the guy spreading the disinformation and inflaming uninformed opinions. It's not that people ask the question, it's your inability to inform them that appears to be the problem.
I also get the questions from publishers (because they want me to write the book). I tell them the same things I tell everyone else. The answer and liking the answer are different things, and the Perl 6 project's main goal is not publishing books about Perl 6, and it shouldn't be.
You've had years to figure out how to answer this question with the available information, and it looks like you've finally given up. Now you're creating a false crisis and now positioning yourself to be its savior.Re:I could, sure...
chromatic on 2007-12-28T19:34:36
Because nobody I've ever given the answer of "It'll be done when it's done" is satisfied with it.Perhaps you should explain why that's the answer, as I usually do. That turns the answer from "We're not going to tell you" or "We don't want to tell you" to "We can't really answer that question, but here's what we know so far."
ye olde liste of arcane documentes
rjbs on 2007-12-28T17:37:29
Patrick has made a number of excellent progress reports recently - http://use.perl.org/user/pmichaud/journal
chromatic has been posting meeting minutes from the p6 developers for ages - http://use.perl.org/user/chromatic/journal
There's a Pugs Wiki with links to lots of useful stuff like the documentation,
the Pugs Blog, logs of the Pugs IRC channel, a "run perl 6 in your browser interface, and the TPF Perl 6 Wiki.
I found those by using only one resource as a starting point: Google for "perl 6" and clicking around.
It would be nice if perl.org's information on Perl 6 was not so outdated. Maybe its perl6 pages could just link to the wiki. It would be nice if the p6l summaries started again, but I sure as hell don't have the time, and I don't know who does.
I think everyone working on Perl 6 knows that the outside world is wondering how long it will take. The longer they spend saying, "We're really working hard!" then the less work they get done. Worse, when they *do* take the time to try and publish information -- and not, mind you, in the form of arcane commits, but actual detailed notes like the ones Peter posted -- the still get asked, "Where is it already? Why can't you give us information?"
If I went to the trouble to stop coding an tell my non-paying and non-participating audience just what I'd been up to, I'd like to think that the audience members might then be willing to relay that information to others when asked, rather than say, "Yeah isn't it crazy that they aren't giving us information?"
It seems like there is a huge amount of information about what's going on with Perl 6, and maybe insufficient links to any one supply of it to hit the top of the results for googling perl 6. Fixing that seems like the right solution. Then, people can be pointed to Google, as is the general solution to anything.Re:ye olde liste of arcane documentes
chromatic on 2007-12-28T19:44:12
It would be nice if perl.org's information on Perl 6 was not so outdated. Maybe its perl6 pages could just link to the wiki. It would be nice if the p6l summaries started again, but I sure as hell don't have the time, and I don't know who does.I'm sure I could find a way to update them once in a while, but I certainly don't have the time to maintain them as a long-term project (and I think I ought to be writing code or documentation instead). This is one of our biggest problems; we don't know where people are finding the misinformation that we want to correct, and we could spend all of our time correcting that misinformation.
Re:ye olde liste of arcane documentes
rjbs on 2007-12-28T19:56:00
Yeah, I am not arguing that anyone should be taken off doing what they're doing. I'm just saying what would be nice.
Pie would be nice, too. Chocolate silk with a graham cracker crust. Mmm!
Is the Perl 6 wiki the most kept-up-to-date place? I wouldn't mind spending a little time finding and trying to deal with a few of the top Google results to get them to point to the right place, either with a link or a redirection. Like, a few hours at least. Let me know and I'll give it a quick go.Re:ye olde liste of arcane documentes
chromatic on 2007-12-28T20:18:36
Is the Perl 6 wiki the most kept-up-to-date place?Let's use it that way for now. If you (or anyone reading this) updates the wiki, I'll get parrotcode.org and dev.perl.org/perl6 updated to point to the wiki.
Re:ye olde liste of arcane documentes
rjbs on 2007-12-29T21:07:13
I don't update the wiki. I only keep a corner of my eye pointed at Parrot and Perl 6. I meant: if the TPF P6 wiki is the best resource (and it seems to be) then I will work on getting other resources to point to it. I'll drop perl.org a line about dev.perl.org, and will update other wikis around.Re:ye olde liste of arcane documentes
brian_d_foy on 2007-12-29T00:20:48
People are always going to be misinformed. It doesn't matter what the topic is. It's not the problem anyone should be working to solve. You can lead a horse to water, and all that.
However, if TPF doesn't want to keep things like dev.perl.org up to date, then the horses don't even have the option of water. I guess that would be a question for someone in TPF's PR department.
For the second post (Perl 6 needs to be deemphasized): not written by Andy.Paul Cory has contributed what I hope is the first of many guest editorials on Perlbuzz. -- Andy
