in reply to Re^2: Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates
in thread A $dayjob Perl 6 program that runs 40x faster on the JVM than on Parrot

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.

the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult

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Re^4: Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 06, 2013 at 07:28 UTC

    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.

[reply]
      Perl 6 is not ready for general consumption. It's not ready for your boss. There's been little incentive to produce documentation for him because the rest of the product isn't ready for him.

      The main audience I'm trying to reach is potential contributors. P6 is a friendly project. Larry hangs out there. You can hack the compiler with nothing but Perl skills. As TheDamian says, it's an extraordinary language. Morale is high and excitement is building. It ought to be attractive to some monks, notwithstanding a decade of disappointment.

      the celebrity tell-all of the Perl-6 cult
[reply]

        Ah, I think I didn't formulate this as understandable as possible. My boss was looking for a language he could implement, as a hobby project. In so far, the incentive would have been there to gain somebody as contributor who has written more than one compiler. But I understand that explaining Perl to non-Perl outsiders is complicated.

        You can hack the compiler with nothing but Perl skills.

        This basically says to me "if you don't know Perl 5, you can't play". This may be the spin you want to give to things on a Perl website, but it does not really help in attracting people who don't already know/like Perl 5.

        If you wanted to say "You can hack the compiler with nothing but Perl 6 skills", please refer to my post about my perception of the Perl 6 documentation and its suitability for people who don't know Perl 5 already.

[reply]
Re^4: Basic Literacy for P6 Advocates
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 06, 2013 at 00:39 UTC
    who said anything about CSS and UGLY? lol
[reply]

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