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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Video and Audio recordings from YAPC::Asia 2007 21 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I no longer buy into the 'we will release when it's ready' perspective. At some point, it's just wanking--by the time you decide it's ready, Python, Ruby, and probably some feverish dream will have made Perl a language of the past. The preponderance of Linux has made bash, awk, and sed more attractive--and very stable. Combining those languages into an as yet undefined Perl6 is *not* a winning combination. Particularly as the CPAN which Perl mongers seem so proud of is a largely uncontrolled mess--there is

    • Any piece of crap seems able to make it into the CPAN.

      That’s why CPAN has succeeded and all other repositories to date either failed outright or stuck around but flounder.

      When you meander, and want trivial bucks vice doing it for love, you are dead, dead, dead. Show me the code. Something stable, that I can program against.

      Do you know how little manpower actually is behind the whole thing? Everyone wants it now, but people actually doing something about getting it now are a damn sight rarer.

      And if you end up using it once it’s ready in spite of your claims now that it will end up being an academic excercise, be prepared to be called on your bluff.

      • I use the CPAN. Some of it is *great*. Some of it is more or less vital, for some of the things I do. As in not always having OS-native tools for things like current cryptographic hashes. Linux md5sum and sha1sum do not always satisfy the need. But in too many cases, you have to do to much legwork researching overall quality, and it's easier to just write what you need, and get an internal code review organized.

        "Do you know how little manpower actually is behind the whole thing?"

        That explains the *problem*,

        • I don't get it. Why are the minimal systems that include Python going to jump up and suddenly include Perl 6 when it comes out, which is a completely different language from Perl 5?

          And why the urgent need to, if your code is in Perl 5, migrate it to Perl 6, which is a completely different language? Or, if you are developing new code, why the need to do it in Perl 6 instead of Perl 5?

          You've got to do "stuff" in fairly short order. What? You have code you're considering migrating to Python or C. You

          --
          J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

          • I suspect you're doing so intentionally in order to come up with this artificial urgency so you can troll Perl in general because Perl 6 isn't here.

            That's a standard, passive-aggressive blackmail tactic. "If you don't do what I want RIGHT NOW, I will leave and take my non-contributing, useless, whiny stop energy somewhere else."

            If we can't discourage people from making those kinds of threats, we can at least encourage them to make good on their threats to leave.

          • "I suspect you're doing so intentionally in order to come up with this artificial urgency so you can troll Perl in general because Perl 6 isn't here." Not the case. I'm faced with a couple of cases where companies are choosing between LAMP (Perl) and Java/Python (leaning more toward Java, after calling around, catching people at home on a Saturday), and have some anecdotal evidence from people I trust, that it's not just me. The issue is that managers aren't seeing Perl 5 & 6 as separate languages. In

            • You get paid to deal with your clueless management. The Perl 6 community does not. If your management isn't interested in being technically astute enough to figure out that Perl 5 is a well-supported language with a well-supported future, your company deserves what it gets for having them.

              --
              J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
              • OK, I can see where that viewpoint comes from, and it's difficult to argue against it.

                My original post seems to have generated more heat than light--accusations of trolling, insults, etc. But if you check out the entire thread, I at least offered to pitch in with some doc writing or testing. I really don't care for writing doc, spare time is limited, etc. I could apply all the usual excuses.

                But the offer *was* on the table. Your reply was, in essence, "You have a problem, not us. Deal with it on your own."

                • Your reply was, in essence, "You have a problem, not us. Deal with it on your own."

                  Actually, that was other people's reply. My reply was essentially, "I can't see why you have a problem."

                  There's a great community-builder.

                  To be honest, I'm not much interested in the Perl 6 community right now. I played that game when it first came out. I received no benefit, and I think the community benefited even less from my participation. So I stopped. Other people can work on building it, if they care. If it gets good, I may join at some point. For right now, I'm a Fiver.

                  It's difficult to see how this discussion has added anything I could take to (admittedly lame) IT mgmnt as a positive.

                  How about "Perl 5 is a viable project with suppor

                  --
                  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

                • So you've successfully taken out the non-language-implementer trash.

                  My concern is merely in promoting the view that non-contributors do not have the right to complain about the schedule.

                  • Checked this as my week is at an end, unless I get called in the middle of the night. Which I probably will--but that's nothing to do with Perl. Just venting about a long FUBAR (in the acronym sense, so caps) week.

                    "My concern is merely in promoting the view that non-contributors do not have the right to complain about the schedule."

                    No argument whatsoever. In the final analysis, intentions and concerns, and whining that 'contributing is hard' don't matter. The only thing that *does* matter is what you've act

                    • As someone who already feels as if they've brought more heat than light to the discussion, I have to STFU, and wish you all the best possible future.

                      Thank you!

                      If you do have time to participate in whatever fashion, we would love to have you. I have two projects to complete in the next fortnight, but once that is done I'll revise the Parrot getting started guide, in the hope that the next people who wander by with an hour or two will be able to make much better progress.

                    • That would be most welcome, hopefully to many people, if you can manage it. I've had very little luck in predicting my schedule beyond two or three days. Good on you, if you can manage it.

                      I bagged daily updates via email, as there was too much flamage (that has a personal impact, believe it or not), and I still have to get on with porting a fair amount of systems software. That is teh sux0r, but I'm stuck. It's a managerial edict thing, and Friday has not been a Good Day. No, it's not the Perl community's p

        • I don’t see your comment quite as negatively as jdavidb or chromatic, but…

          See, there are a lot of people, who, like you, are seeing the same danger and ringing the alarms. The problem is, just because a lot of people are ringing the alarms everywhere, that doesn’t actually get anything done. It’s all well and fine to yell that the house is on fire, but if noone actually starts passing buckets to put the fire out, the house will burn down in spite of the screams.

          You aren’t w

          • "You may have good reasons for not contributing."

            I feel that I have two good reasons:
            1) I don't believe that I have the talent. I'm aware of the difference in talent required to use a language vice implement a language.
            2) Lack of time. There's enough going on at the moment that spare time is really short.

            Reason 2 is fairly lame. There is probably testing or doc work that I could be contributing *something* toward. I'm open to suggestions. Is there a URL you can send me to that describes, for instance, where

            • There is probably testing or doc work that I could be contributing *something* toward.

              We'd love to have you. The best way to get involved is probably to join #perl6 on irc.freenode.net or #parrot on irc.perl.org and ask "Is there anything I can do to help?"

              I believe we've written some getting started guides somewhere, but I can't find them at the moment and they might not be linked prominently enough or might be incomplete or somewhat misleading. Any suggestions you or anyone else reading this might

              • Will do tomorrow, for the IRC. We will probably run across one another, at some point. Be advised that a frank discussion of your using terms such as "whining, crying, ungrateful." will ensue.

                I don't think that was justified, and I'm mildly upset. You can make all of that right if you can run down any of those 'getting started' guides. Or find whoever might have rough notes, if it didn't actually happen. Any *accurate* public starting point is a Good Thing, if it didn't exist before, right?

                • You can make all of that right if you can run down any of those 'getting started' guides.

                  The best I can find at the moment (as I've been home for most of a full day in the past week) is "How to Get Involved" on Parrotcode [parrotcode.org]. It's fairly lame, so when I get back home and sleep for a week, I'll pull out the "What's going on where in the Parrot source code?" from my Parrot talk into a better getting started guide.

            • To be honest: I can’t help. I haven’t pitched in appreciably either, just watched.

              However, it’s a question that I’ve seen raised many times, and that I’d try to find an answer to as well, if I was to start now.

              I just went to look at the state of http://dev.perl.org/perl6/ [perl.org]; it seems that it has started falling out of date in all areas (a few are long out of date) and in any case it isn’t helpful at taking up newcomers and helping them into the fold.

              There are some IRC

              • However, what happens on IRC is (as you see) thereafter invsible to the rest of the world (and in some ways that’s a good thing).
                Not exactly. http://irc.pugscode.org/ [pugscode.org] seems to be the online archive for #perl6. Not sure how far back it goes though.
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