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Re: Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates

by raiph (Deacon)
on Aug 04, 2013 at 22:57 UTC ( [id://1047833]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates
in thread A $dayjob Perl 6 program that runs 40x faster on the JVM than on Parrot

Keep telling yourself that a series of blogs, example mathematical puzzles, and Larry promising that this year for sure he'll write a book (he's been saying that since 2005) are acceptable forms of documentation that people like me want. (They aren't.)

You suggested that the only documentation was "a pile of specification tests hyperlinked to synopses under constant churn". That comment ignored the doc.perl6.org project and the above follow up does so again.

You do Rosettacode a great disservice, and mislead monks, when you suggest that it's just mathematical puzzles. The 679 programming tasks cover any programming task contributors have chosen to contribute. It only takes a quick glance to see that most of them are things like basic and advanced programming techniques, file, string, Unicode, and date manipulation, and so on. (There are Perl 6 solutions for over 600 of them.)

(Edit: removed comment about Larry, and simplified initial paragraph.)

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Re^2: Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 05, 2013 at 07:50 UTC

    The so-called Perl6 documentation is a very sore point. Recently my boss tried to look at Perl 6, but all of the human-readable documentation he could find as an outsider assumed that he was already fluent in Perl 5. This is quite bad, as it prevents people who do not know Perl 5 from ever learning Perl 6, unless they take the detour through Perl 5.

    I don't know what to make of the linked http://doc.perl6.org/ - it feels to me like some automatically generated documentation that is not intended for human consumption. Maybe it is a good reference if you're looking for a concise description of how an operator works, but it surely can't be intended as the starting point for getting in touch with Perl 6.

      a very sore point ... my boss tried to look at Perl 6 ... documentation ... assumed that he was already fluent in Perl 5

      P6 isn't ready for general consumption, and documentation is one of many reasons for that. That said, fwiw, I don't think p6doc (doc.perl6.org) assumes knowledge of P5 (beyond its existence).

      http://doc.perl6.org/ - it feels to me like some automatically generated documentation that is not intended for human consumption. Maybe it is a good reference if you're looking for a concise description of how an operator works

      Update: The CSS etc for doc.perl6.org has been improved to make it less ugly; perhaps it now looks intended for human consumption.

      p6doc is intended to be the P6 equivalent of P5's perldoc. "I want p6doc and doc.perl6.org to become the No. 1 resource to consult when you want to know something about a Perl 6 type or routine (be it method, sub or operator)." -- Moritz, in the readme of the p6doc project.

      it surely can't be intended as the starting point for getting in touch with Perl 6.

      Right.

      Imo the smart starting point is to join the IRC channel #perl6 on freenode, introduce yourself, and ask for pointers. If you can't or won't join #perl6, see my P6-documentation-for-contributors PerlMonks post for some alternate starting points.

        I don't think that joining irc, introducing himself and asking for pointers is what my boss is interested in. He's looking for a language to implement and not for a community to join. I have not looked into the documentation, but unless there is enough documentation that does not rely on Perl 5 knowledge, I think you will find it very hard because you basically exclude most of your audience:

        • People who don't know Perl 5 - the documentation is useless to them unless they learn Perl 5 first
        • People who know Perl 5 - while these people could use the documentation, Perl 6 has burned lots of goodwill and interest in the last 12 years

        You seem to be trying to work on the second audience, people who already know Perl 5, and I don't know the efforts to address people who don't already know Perl 5, but at least my second-hand perception is that there is simply no attempt to explain Perl 6 stand-alone.

        who said anything about CSS and UGLY? lol

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