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chromatic (983)

chromatic
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http://wgz.org/chromatic/
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Journal of chromatic (983)

Thursday March 27, 2008
04:55 PM

You Think He's Getting Paid For This?

[ #35991 ]

ES4 has overspent its complexity budget in order to explore a large design space. It is now shrinking to meet practical budgets involving Ecma member consensus, prime mover commitments, fatigue effects, community expectations, and the like. No one working on ES4 wants it to be like Perl 6. We aim to finish this year.

Brendan Eich, Complexity Tax

If I estimate with any degree of accuracy, Brendan alone has earned more in salary over the course of JavaScript's lifetime than every paid contributor to Perl 6 has earned in combination throughout that project. I can sort of imagine that a few of the other people involved with ES4 have received a few dollars too.

Fairer comparisons, please.


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  • I think you're reading too much into it. He's just saying that it got too complex and needed to prune back the complexity to get it finished.

    Now maybe perl6 needed to do that a long time ago, though it's a bit late for that. But I don't think the comparison was warrantless.

    • I have difficulty with conversations about software project schedules and scope which include comparisons to Perl 6 but neglect to mention the budget of Perl 6. That's all. If the ES4 committee spent on ES4 what Perl 6 has cost in real dollars so far, ES4 would be a great language for writing alert( "Hello, world!" );. They might even have money left over for doughnuts.

      • Well nobody's donated time is "free", so I don't think that's entirely fair either. It's impossible to calculate.

        • Sure, but I believe that any Reasonable Person would look at a schedule that relies on hordes of volunteers who put in 40-hour weeks and say "This might be optimistic."

  • Perl6 has been going for 8ish years. That is about the amount of time between the release of perl 1 and perl 5.01

    • I don't care about calendar time. Let's compare paid developer time.

      • The "contribute money" page at donate.perlfoundation.org does not allow you to explicitly specify "I want my donation to go towards Perl 6 development".

        Seems like it would be nice if there was an easy and centralized way for money contributors to pump cash directly into specific tasks needing to be done for Perl 6... Not sure how fair this would work out in practice though.

        • Ever since P6 was a project and a divisive one at that, I asked that such a restricted giving mechanism be put in place so that people could direct their donations to the projects they were interested in. I'm still waiting. It'll likely happen about the same time P6 is released. :)

          • There has to be some reason why that extra combo box item is missing, otherwise it would've been added already.

            • Well, it's a lot more complicated than a 'combo box', you need a good accountant and the ability to be accountable to the donors.
      • Calendar is all I can really compare. If someone of greater knowledge than I wants to list out the people paid full time to develop perl 1-5 then they can. If not I'm happy enough to keep on assuming 1-5 is compatible to 6 in this respect but produced a final product.
        • Well, if there's no schedule, I'm less likely to become an available worker...
          • Sorry, this was meant to be a reply to parent (chromatic).

          • Schedules for projects with full-time paid workers are difficult enough to create. Any schedule for a project which relies chiefly on volunteers working in their spare time is going to be, at best, a fairy tale. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

  • I swear, anytime someone mentions Perl6 or lack thereof after 8 long years you are bitching about not getting paid or whining about how nobody loves you all. Should we buy you a violin, son? A hat to put out on the sidewalk to go with it?

    So-called "Open Source" projects that turn into dick slapping contests over the size of the budgets miss their own irony. Buy your own damn donuts. :)

    • Should we buy you a violin, son?

      I already have one, but it would be just swell if you could teach the Internet the basics of project management, and specifically the relationship between available workers and a schedule.

      • Well, only after you teach the Masters course in Why we should give a fuck if you all are getting a salary on the same level as another project with lots of commercial application and backers.

        It reminds me of the guy who did the original "Fools Errand" crypto game for the Mac. He announced he was working on the sequel for OSX and invited people to pay early (Damn you, pudge :)) Now, this was around the time Perl6 was announced. Six years ago I would have loved to have that game for hours and hours of enjo

        • Until sixty seconds ago, I thought that anyone who had spent any time at all around Jarkko, for example, would know the connection between the available free time of volunteers and the amount of practical work accomplished on a project.

          You don't have to care about any project, of course, but you don't have the right to tell volunteers what they should or shouldn't be working on or how much time they should or shouldn't spend on a project.

          • What, project management has become an exercise in whining about not getting paid? Jarkko had a day job and he spent all of his time outside of that day job on Perl. I'm not sure had someone been offering money that they could have afforded him. If anyone has less pity than me for the lot of you working for nothing I'd like to meet them.

            Do or don't but getting all bent out of shape over someone making a comment that may lead to Perl6 being a synonym for an eternal project isn't a way to generate sympathy

            • Jarkko had a day job and he spent all of his time outside of that day job on Perl.

              I can imagine you expressing strong words toward anyone who criticized the release schedule of Perl 5.8 for similar reasons. Lest you think I'm begging for money, let me be exceedingly clear about my point.

              See Spot. See Spot program. See Spot program four hours a week in his spare time.

              See Jane. See Jane program. See Jane program forty hours a week in her job.

              See Jane accomplish roughly an order of magnitude mor

              • I believe the thanks Jarkko got when he released 5.8 was a lot of grumbling about 'core bloat'. Although one person did send along a bottle of single malt. There were plenty of critics all along the way and his magnanimous public face was not always so at home. I would have intervened if he had decided to continue past 5 years of sadomaschochistic behaviour such as being the pumpkin is. I doubt 5.8 would have been released any sooner had he been on the payroll. I am similarly skeptical for P6.

                Jane ain't

                • Jane ain't gonna get a regular paycheck for P6 so Jane better cheer up and get on with it or find a more rewarding hobby...like getting root canals.

                  This Jane would settle for a significant portion of the people who complain about the large gestation period of Perl 6 acknowledging that volunteers do not and will not work on predictable schedules.

                  I don't care if I never get paid for any of my work on this. That was never my goal nor a motivating factor. I want to use the results and I want other peopl

                  • Paid programmers generally dont' and won't work on predictable schedules. :)

                    I don't know that people complain so much about the long dev time for P6 anymore, they talk about it and many don't have any expectations that it will ever come to pass. Lowering expectations is less a criticism than bracing for reality. And after so many years, really, wouldn't you be prepared for that eventuality? 5.10 had some problems for a while in this vein, but fires got lit under asses and things got moving again. If 5.10

                    • Jane should keep her eye on the prize and read less on the net. :)

                      Jane needs to do something between Valgrind and test suite runs. Maybe Jane needs a better micro hobby!

                    • I would suggest installing the meetime plugin for firefox and/or a greasemonkey script to filter out all the discussions about perl 6 not being here yet, and instead updating the page I started but haven't been able to update on the perl 6 wiki that goes some way to answering the 'are we there yet' question : http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?what_can_i_do_with_perl_6_today [perlfoundation.org]

                      This has 2 benefits
                      - one discussing perl 6 on internet discussion forums isn't going to make you happier (how often is the r
                      --

                      @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
                      print reverse @JAPH;
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