Re: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl?

<joke type = 'half'>

8 years of development?

How much more prove of 'community rewrite' do you need? Without "the community" (there wasn't even a large one even if he had wanted to include them) it took Larry less than 8 years to write perl 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
</joke>

Comment on Re: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl?

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Re^2: How much is Perl 6 the community rewrite of Perl? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jan 01, 2009 at 21:31 UTC
Without "the community" ... it took Larry less than 8 years to write perl 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. How long should it take to discover the need for, invent, and prototype a hybrid top-down, bottom-up parser which features lexically scoped modifications and runs efficiently on multiple implementations? If you can answer that question, you've solved the software project management problem.	[reply]
Re^2: How much is Perl6 the community rewrite of Perl? by zby (Vicar) on Jan 01, 2009 at 20:25 UTC
This is calling for a much longer discussion - but for now a short answer - perhaps it was worth it. In our culture there is the worship of the lone inventor - but in fact this is a myth - all of the great inventions required assembling of ideas from many people (see The Myths of Innovation). So maybe it was worth it to break out from the single God King way of development? Of course there is also the point that if Larry did not so ostensibly step off from the reign - then would that be be really different? After all Larry was never shy to admit that he borrows ideas from other people. And now even after that declaration - isn't Larry still the main force behind the development? Actually - this is a part of my original question.	[reply]