in reply to Musings on the future

Let me give you a short update on what I think the progress is on the different fronts. This is to be taken with a grain rock of salt, and personal opinion only.

Design the language - TimToady once said "We are done with the first 80%, and well into the second 80%". I'd think the specs are about 65% there. Most of the syntax, object model and regexes/rules are there, but things like I/O and concurrency are mostly missing.

Code Parrot I'm a bit lost with this one I have to confess, knowing not much about the internals. From the version number I'd say about 50% are done. But don't be fooled by that number - parrot is rather usable now, and a worthy target for any dynamic language.

It now implements nearly all of Perl 6's object model, which means a lot less trouble for a Perl 6 compiler.

Let me introduce another step:

Bootstrap 6-on-6        [X]

The goal is to have a Perl 6 compiler written in Perl 6, and that has to be bootstrapped. It looks like that can be done with either pugs or kp6, and perhaps with the help of perl 5 scripts like cheat and metholate.

That's hard to estimate, but I think bootstrapping is done by 50%. Note that pugs uses a Perl 6 prelude, and kp6 has some of its runtime already written in Perl 6.

Code perl. Now that's one where a number between 0 and 100% doesn't really make sense. But I predict that in about one year or one and a half, programming Perl 6 will be really fun, because the implementations will be about as powerfull (or even more so) as perl5, but not quite as reliable and fast.

PROFIT. I profit now from Perl 6, if in a somewhat metaphorical sense. I learned some things about open source development, writing compilers, better understanding parts of the language and I learned to know great people from many countries.

As a side node I wonder how much further the Perl 6 development process would be if all the people that wonder when, how and if Perl 6 will be ready instead contributed a few lines of code. (No, I don't really wonder. That was just rhetorical blurb).

Perl 6 in German

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Re^2: Musings on the future
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 17, 2007 at 16:29 UTC
    As a side node I wonder how much further the Perl 6 development process would be if all the people that wonder when, how and if Perl 6 will be ready instead contributed a few lines of code.

    ... or documentation, or tests, or test results, or patches to design documents, or money, or hardware, or....

[reply]
      How much does one have to donate to have a right to muse about Perl 6 development and reach negative conclusions?

      I'm not serious about that, but I mean to make a point. We have seen a number of posts here criticizing the (lack of) speed of Perl 6 development, and we have also seen a lot of rhetoric discrediting those people based on their lack of contributions.

      Some people can contribute, some cannot. Are a person's arguments legitimate only to the exact degree of his contribution? To rephrase, is that which I have said less valid or fair, in and of itself, simply because I have written it instead of someone else?

      One could suggest that my lack of contribution has limited my insight and thus caused inaccuracies in my points. Of course that would require one to actually identify, claim, and dismantle inaccuracies.

      Alternatively one can just suggest that I have failed to merit a right to make those points in the first place.

[reply]
        How much does one have to donate to have a right to muse about Perl 6 development and reach negative conclusions?

        Anyone willing to pontificate about any perceived deficiency of the output of an entirely community-driven project where everyone doing the work is a volunteer severely misunderstands the nature of community-driven development.

        Unlike projects where people wave money and resources and paid employees have to do what the people with the money say, volunteers only work because they want to. Everyone working on Parrot and Perl 6 right now is just a normal average person just like you. The only difference is that they actually did something instead of sitting around and complaining that nothing gets done.

        I don't care if you don't have the time or the talent or the inclination to contribute. You can still use the code anyway. You can believe what you want about the code. Just don't expect anyone to care about the ingratitude of people who complain and never contribute about projects run entirely by volunteers who get absolutely nothing from you and ask absolutely nothing from you.

        How do you think the work gets done though?

[reply]
Re^2: Musings on the future
by zshzn (Hermit) on Sep 18, 2007 at 07:32 UTC
    Thank you for the estimates. They are certainly helpful, and it is refreshing to see estimates.
[reply]

In Section Meditations