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Re^3: -Ofun times

by Anonymous Monk
on Apr 14, 2014 at 08:31 UTC ( [id://1082201]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^2: -Ofun times
in thread -Ofun times

That's only if you do waterfall-style development, and if you have well-financed dev team.

How is that true? Does agile say that you requirements be never frozen?

And having a dog slow compiler frustrates people, and drives them away.

How big is your user base and how many have been driven away? There are slower tools, like Scala. Which many people have no problem in using. Mainly because they can atleast use it, instead of a product that isn't complete but promises to be. I guess you don't realize you have a literally zero user base, apart from a few people who like to write one liners on IRC or write toy programs to implement commonly known algorithms on Forums which no one takes seriously. Which explains why they are happy with a sub set of features. Because for most toy programs you don't need much, but the existing ones to run fine

Also, while Rakudo isn't feature complete, most user complaints these days concern performance and reliability, not features.

Also who are these users? Can you show us at least on serious use of Perl 6 in the wild? A big company, A start up? Anything?

C++ with gcc and clang, and C# with mono/roslyn, and java with OracleJVM/OpenJDK + javac. The compiler (and VM) developers spend quite some time optimizing for performance. Yet none of the languages are feature complete

They are incomplete in the same sense iPhone, or your TV is incomplete. It doesn't mean iPhone's or TV's aren't usable now. It only means they may get a few feature based on the competition they face in the future

Perl 6 is just incomplete. Its a bit like shipping an iPhone without a feature to store phone numbers. That's a very different kind of incompleteness than the former.

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Re^4: -Ofun times
by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 14, 2014 at 08:47 UTC
    Also who are these users?

    We get feedback on IRC, twitter, mailing lists, blogs, and on conferences in real life. I don't know what all of those people do with Perl 6, only some. Some of them write IRC bots, others write Perl 6 code that refactors their java code, again others manipulate CAD file with Perl 6, for their own consulting business.

    Some of those projects are developed and maintained over years, and make their owners money. IMHO that's "serious".

    Anyway, are you trying to imply that we shouldn't listen to user feedback because there are no facebook-scale Perl 6 installation? That it's OK to be annoyingly slow because we don't have a huge user base? And instead listen to a rather aggressive, anonymous poster on perlmonks?

    Anyway, I'm afraid I'm wasting my time here. If we implement new features, people complain that rakudo is unusable because it's too slow and buggy; if we spend time optimizing it, people complain that we should make it feature complete first. Whatever we do, we'll get hate and pushback from random people on the Internet, so there's nothing left to do but do what we think is best.

      Why not triage things? In the long list of things. I would prefer to be spec complete first and then take up optimization. No one here is saying optimization shouldn't be done. The question is when? When product itself is half complete whats the point in optimizing an half complete product?

      Whatever we do, we'll get hate and pushback from random people on the Internet, so there's nothing left to do but do what we think is best.

      This is what bought us into this trouble in the first place. Secondly if a project is 14 years late. And all people see is sub projects and re writes how do you expect people to react?

      Either way the days of the Perl 6 hope are over. We are now in a stage where we accept we won't see a Perl 6 ever. If we ever see, its just a good thing to have.

      Say whatever you like, but by looking at the current progress I see at least 3 years of waiting time till we get something useful.

        TL;DR I'm excited about P6. I see it growing stronger day by day. I'm not surprised that Damian Conway is engaging again, that Nicholas Clark is helping out on #moarvm daily and landing commits, that CPAN integration is underway, and so on. YMMV.

        Why not triage things?

        Triage and other ordering techniques are bog standard task management techniques. So of course the P6 project are doing that.

        This is illustrative of one of several problems I've found in talking about P6. You're assuming a priori that P6ers aren't triaging, which is, imo, tantamount to suggesting P6ers haven't got a clue.

        (I can already hear the knee jerk response: "well why else haven't they shipped something "usable and useful" yet? they must be doing something wrong". If that's not your initial response that's great. But if it is then I say you've got work to do with your own mental processes before thinking about continuing this discussion and if it's where you end up then I respectfully request you don't try to continue this discussion.)

        No, I'm not willing to discuss our triage lists in this thread, and probably not here at the monastery, because I've found such discussion to be consistently unproductive and frequently down right hostile.

        You, and any other monks or readers are encouraged to visit the freenode IRC channel #perl6 and discuss this or any other issue. I think you'll find it productive if you're civil and ask good questions when the right folk (mostly European) are around.

        No one here is saying optimization shouldn't be done. The question is when? When product itself is half complete whats the point in optimizing an half complete product?.

        First, yes, several folk here are saying optimization shouldn't be done because they explicitly dismiss P6 out of hand. Please think more carefully about your words if you want a more productive outcome from these sorts of exchanges.

        I don't agree that the product is half complete (in relation to what would be needed to make optimizing a rational thing to do, so I'm not talking about, say, user doc). Imo it's around 100% complete in relation to what has been deferring most optimization until now.

        That said, this is whirlpool dev, so the spec itself isn't complete and the tests matching the spec that exists aren't complete (and probably never will be) and Rakudo doesn't pass all the existing tests (and probably never will on all platforms) and tests aren't the same as something working out in the field.

        So "We're probably doomed, we're probably gonna fail ... but just cause were doomed doesn't mean you know we cant get up in the morning and do work" (to quote a Mozillan from before Firefox).

        there's nothing left to do but do what we think is best.
        This is what bought us into this trouble in the first place.

        I may be parsing your words incorrectly but you seem to be suggesting that folk doing what they think is best is what got us in to trouble. If you really are thinking that then there is truly no point in engaging. For now I'll work on the basis I'm misparsing you and keep going.

        if a project is 14 years late. And all people see is sub projects and re writes how do you expect people to react?

        It's probably more like 17+ years late. Many fundamental problems (though not all) that I observed with the Perl language, perl interpreter, and community in the 90s are still extant.

        One of the biggest problems is the way folk talk to each other. Why is it that "all people see is sub projects and rewrites" given that this is just a small part of what's actually happening and almost none of my posts here and elsewhere have been about sub-projects or rewrites that weren't essential as far as contributors were concerned?

        For example, afaict most P6ers consider MoarVM to be a wonderful saving grace that's rescued us from being dependent on the Parrot project rather than as a random sub project or (unnecessary) rewrite. But you (and many others) choose to see it as the latter despite overwhelming evidence that Parrot is stalled. How can this be? What can we do about it?

        Either way the days of the Perl 6 hope are over. We are now in a stage where we accept we won't see a Perl 6 ever.

        For those experiencing anger due to unmet expectations, or overwhelming pain due to as yet unrealized hopes, letting go is wise.

        I don't think anyone needs to go to the opposite extreme and assume, based on lack of knowledge and/or inability to control the future, that P6 won't ever be what they want it to be. But if that's what it takes for a given individual to get peace then so be it.

        Say whatever you like, but by looking at the current progress I see at least 3 years of waiting time till we get something useful.

        Who is this "we"? Why are you excluding those (few) who think "we" already have something useful? What's wrong with recognizing that these things aren't a boolean once you go past an individual user or use-case, and that by some measures (eg speed and RAM consumption) it's getting more useful over time?

        I see it as entirely plausible that P6 will never be useful and usable enough to interest a lot of folk that find P5 to be fine for their needs.

        But I also see it as entirely plausible that it will go the other way, that it'll become increasingly useful and usable for a broader range of user and use-cases than the existing Perl language and perl interpreter have ever covered, and that the P5 and P6 of 2017 will be well on the way to broad reintegration.

        A key to a more positive outcome is more contribution and a key to that is having fun, which this isn't. So unless I see posts that I consider respectful towards P6ers, this will be my last post at the monastery for about a month or so. I hope this post will be read by at least one person one day but I very much recognize it's extraordinarily long and boring, and probably not productive, and there's a very good chance that no one will ever read it. Such is life.

        Peace.

      Way to strawman, Moritz.

      perl-6 has no real users (except that sorry sad sack writing IRC bots and making millions of dollars in production!!) because no-one trusts you all to deliver something "useful and usable". That was Rakudo Star and that was four years ago and you couldn't even be arsed to write documentation or make installable packages or keep the (few) modules passing their tests or even compiling from month to month.

      No, Rakudo Star was followed by a huge rewrite that took months. At the end of the process you all announced your intention to abandon the single piece of the project that demonstrated any project management acumen at all, and now you're wondering why all of its contributors vanished.

      Somehow you've convinced yourself that the only user feedback you've ever received is "it's too slow".

      But I guess that's what you get when you don't have any users besides the spec tests.

      After 14 years, you don't even have a static website generator, let alone a replacement for WordPress.

      That's why people don't take you seriously. Because after all these years, you still don't have anything anyone would feed to a dog.

      So go on, keep doing what you think is best. Because it's clearly worked out well so far. perl-6 is going to have as many users as Perl sometime soon, not because perl-6 is getting more users but because it's poisoned Perl.

Re^4: -Ofun times
by salva (Canon) on Apr 14, 2014 at 08:49 UTC
    I would like to say that:

    I am one of those users which don't use Rakudo mostly because it is too damn slow.

    Last month I switched back from Scala to Perl 5 one of my projects because the scala compiler/toolset was so slow I couldn't bear it anymore.

    I don't mind about the incomplete parts, I could add them myself if required. Perl 5 is also quite incomplete in several ways.

    Yea, I like implementing algorithms!

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