In Re^3: Building Perl6, brian d foy said:

If we're still designing Perl 6, we're in pretty bad shape.

Now I know brian and I know what he contributes, so this is not a rant aimed at him in any sense of the word. However....

<pet_peeve>We?

One of the most difficult lessons for me to learn from Perl 6 is that people who don't contribute can have all of the opinions they want... but they don't matter.

They can watch the project. They can complain. They can even use the code at any point. They can take the ideas and discussions and learn about what Perl 6 will do or use the ideas in their own projects.

They just don't have any right to expect that they deserve any attention from the people actually contributing.

That's not to say that Perl 6 hasn't taken a long time or that Parrot hasn't had (or doesn't have) problems or that Pugs is good or Pugs is bad or that there's ever been a schedule or ever will be a schedule or anything like that.

It's just that the doors are wide open for people to contribute code, documentation, tests, money, time, ideas, questions, suggestions, hints, and requests in several media. It seems like a minimum standard of courtesy to attempt to contribute in some way before saying "We should..." and "We ought to..." because, frankly, as one of the we, I'm doing this for fun; and being told what to do by someone who's never even used the code and given feedback is pretty close to the opposite of fun.

There you go: this is the so-called big, unspoken problem with Perl development (Perl 5 and Perl 6). It's not fun for the handful of people actually doing the work, especially when they so rarely hear "Thank you for all of your hard volunteer work" and so often hear "This isn't what I want", "This is taking too long", "You should do what I want how I want right now", and "Why aren't you paying attention to meeeeeeee?"

See MakeMaker. See Module::Build. See the CPAN. See a whole pile of pumpkings. See a hundred other people and projects.</pet_peeve>

In reply to No, "We" Don't Have to Do Anything by chromatic

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