Perl 6 didn't evolve, they threw away most of Perl 5....

Untrue. The apocalypses have always been deltas against Perl 5.

Promises of the money founded Perl 6 community weren't and couldn't be delivered after 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and finally 8 years of money founded development.

How much money? Do you know? (I'll tell you this -- all of the money that's gone into Parrot, Pugs, Perl 6, Rakudo, SMOP, Elf, and whatever else in the past eight years couldn't buy you one year of the time spent on the JVM or the CLR. You might be able to pay for the coffee breaks of all of the developers of either system.)

So remember that this is just one view, and mostly from the outside, of the state of affairs.

That amuses me. It's not as if we're some secret cabal who meets in shadowy, dark rooms to cackle and drink brandy and smoke big cigars and plot the future. There are eight freakin' years of email you could dig through to find out what's happened. I've published design minutes from weekly Perl 6 meetings for years. There's no super-secret initiation ceremony into the hidden mysteries of Perl 6. All you have to do to become part of the secret shadowy cabal of volunteer community members developing Perl 6 is ask a question on IRC or a mailing list, submit a patch, write a test, report test results, point out a typo in the documentation, or a dozen other very small tiny things. I'm not sure how we could make that easier, other than kidnapping you and tying your hands to the keyboard.

I just don't get why it's easier to speculate about things from a perspective you admit is flawed, especially when it's so simple to get a better perspective.

I just don't get why it's easier to speculate about things

As you say, there are "eight freakin' years of email" to "dig through." It's so much easier to speculate!

I've semi-casually tried to get an idea of "what's going on with Perl 6" a few times. Perhaps my attempts have been unreasonably casual, but they've not been very satisfying. Getting a good perspective is simple the same way reading the Camel from cover to cover is simple, which is to say it's easier to understand how to do it than it is to take the time to do it.

It's so much easier to speculate!

I suppose one way to read that is as a complaint that we've put out far too much information about what we're doing and why.

1. I said I followed the development as a lurker. As a lurker subscribed to perl6-all mailing list, reading mostly regularly. I know pretty well what happened the last 6 years.

2. I also didn't say or admit that my perspective is flawed. I only said what my perspective is.

3. Why should I spent one minute on coding for Perl 6 when I can actually do new stuff and solve my problems with an already good language which I don't have to bugfix (Perl 5).

Why should I spent one minute on coding for Perl 6 when I can actually do new stuff and solve my problems with an already good language which I don't have to bugfix (Perl 5).

If everyone had the same attitude, there'd be no PerlMonks, no CPAN, no Perl 6, and no Perl 5, to name a few projects which exist due to volunteer effort.

I know pretty well what happened the last 6 years.

If you think, as you wrote:

Perl 6 didn't evolve, they threw away most of Perl 5, maybe except the sigil syntax, also things were promised that never were realized or could actually be realized, which formed a community of dreamers, following the dream of the ultimate programming language. And currently it looks like those dreamers weren't able to deliver _anything_ at least remotely stable, except a very fuzzy specification and a test suite.

... then I don't believe -- at all -- that you know what happened the past few years.

I think chromatic meant that if you think you are on the outside, than that itself is the flawed perspective. The only one preventing you from "getting in" is yourself. You are welcome here. (If you know the secret knock. Just kidding. :P)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

"All you have to do to become part of the secret shadowy cabal of volunteer community members developing Perl 6 is ask ..."

Sounds familiar ... http://www.askafreemason.org/ ;)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Ok, then more close to the original subject: Originally it was a "community rewrite", but recently Larry got more and more involved with actual "Perl 6" development, but is still not the driving force. _If_ "Perl 6" is ever finished the current way it is developed, I would call it a rewrite, which was driven by a "community".

I would say it's not "the community rewrite" but "a community rewrite".

The question is also which community we are talking about. It certainly is not the Perl 5 community (largely consisting of people active on p5p and all the authors who upload their modules to CPAN). Of course there are some people who are involved in both communities, like for instance Nicolas Clark or chromatic.

As far as I perceived it: The bulk of the people who originally formed the "Perl 6" community, writing and discussing the RFCs, attracted people who were interested in experimenting with programming languages. After some years of breeding out new ideas and no real progress on the parrot/perl6 implementation front the bulk of Perl 5 people left mostly.

So we got the community of active developers who want to get things done in realtime on the Perl 5 side, and another community of language experimentalists on the Perl 6 side.

I too have been eagerly waiting for Perl6 for a long time and now it has receded to be just a vague dream. I like the idea of Perl6 a lot and I hope that it will see the light of day. Preferably sooner than later, but only in a form that is usable, like Perl5.