Like much of what Larry has said over the years about his thinking about the long term big picture, the stuff I quoted has always made sense to me.

In contrast his talk of an alpha was essentially him relaying an estimate from the core group, a group that had already decided they wanted Larry to stay out of project management or implementation.

The plan allotted him just 4 weeks to go from initial design concept to finished specification once the RFCs were in. Then, instead of the anticipated couple dozen RFCs, a few hundred of them rolled in.

By mid September 2000 anyone paying attention should have known that the estimate from the group for an alpha (which Larry had simply relayed on that first day) was going to be years off.

The translation narrative still makes sense to me. I also see Inline::Perl5 as an appropriate solution in many scenarios.

By mid September 2000 anyone paying attention should have known that the estimate from the group for an alpha (which Larry had simply relayed on that first day) was going to be years off.

Would you then suggest that subsequent communications from the core team about an 18 month schedule (take, for example, the original project manager upholding his 18 month timeline from mid-September 2000) were made in bad faith?

That's not helping your argument.

I suppose you could point to this end of September update that the schedule would move by *two weeks*, but that's also not helping your argument.

Seems weird to hew so closely to "what Larry actually intended in the announcement" and then immediately walk it back with "but everyone knew that was a lie by September" while jumping way over what Larry actually said in September.

I am continually amused and disappointed by P6 advocates trying to revise history when that history is so easily searched.

I am continually amused and disappointed by P6 advocates trying to revise history when that history is so easily searched.

Indeed.

And I am continually saddened by your insistence on pouring salt into the Perl 6 inflicted wound that you seem to have. I think it's time to let the scar heal.

Would you then suggest that subsequent communications from the core team about an 18 month schedule (take, for example, the original project manager upholding his 18 month timeline from mid-September 2000) were made in bad faith?

Why would anyone suggest that? I see optimism, some folk being better informed than others, chaos, confusion, delights, surprises, unrealistic expectations, disappointments -- the usual ups and downs of real life.

Nat introduced an explicitly unreliable 18 month timeline on August 18th, 2000:

There are still some unspecified dates ... I'll unilaterally decide those ... The final release will be on (he picks a date approx. 18 months from the start of the project) 1 January 2002. ... Remember, the further into the future one peers, the less reliable the crystal ball is.

On September 3rd he wrote:

I hadn't envisaged the sheer number of RFCs

I do not think he was "upholding his 18 month timeline" when he wrote the first post you linked:

I want this RFC hell to end, and I want us to stick to some of the major milestones (and Larry's release of the language specs is one of those).

A week later, on Sept 20, he posted the second message you linked:

I talked with Larry about schedule. I'd been under the impression he was going to produce a draft language spec on October 1, and the final on October 14. He set me straight: draft on October 14 (his keynote to the Atlanta Linux Showcase), no deadline yet for final spec. ... Larry said he wanted to have a comment on every RFC by October 14. That's a lot of work :-)

I suspect Nat had gotten confused by this time. How could Larry produce a draft spec from the RFCs the same day the RFC process ended? This seems to conflict with skud's schedule and common sense.

Nat thought Larry producing a comment per RFC by Oct 14 was "a lot of work". But he also thought Larry had said he'd have a draft spec done by the same day. Again, I suspect Nat had gotten confused. (For the record here's a summary of what Larry did for ALS.)

At this point, the timeline past September 30th was not only "unreliable", as Nat had already written it was, with the longer term milestones the most unreliable of all, as Nat had also already written, but was essentially unknowable until Larry wrote the spec.

And the rest, as you say, is searchable history.

So we expected some definition of alpha in a year, did we get it? Or did the feature creep only just started to gain speed a year after the announcement with the specs getting (some definition of) finished only several years later?

So we expected some definition of alpha in a year, did we get it?

We did not. It took about 10 years or so.

Or did the feature creep only just started to gain speed a year after the announcement with the specs getting (some definition of) finished only several years later?

I never realized this until I re-read the link when raiph posted it, but Larry's observation about the time between releases getting longer and longer applies even more so to the Apocalypse documents, which reached 6 or 7 before being replaced with something else. I find that amusing.