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Re^2: To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?

by raiph (Deacon)
on May 11, 2013 at 00:42 UTC ( [id://1033067]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?
in thread To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?

Edit: Let me emphasize that I very much appreciate any and all sincere or good humored responses. This includes lists like yours or the one-liners a couple folk have added. My intent below isn't a rebuttal by any means; it's just an attempt to clarify the points I didn't understand and/or suggest a mitigation that folk reading along might appreciate.

Stepping on toes.

Edit: Do you mean that the mere act of contributing to Perl 6 will tick some folk off in such a way that it's just not worth it?

Establishing stupid namespaces, etc, that will become a FILO albatross.

Do you think there are already stupid Perl 6 namespaces etc. that have become permanent?

Are you interested in the underlying technical mechanisms at both language and archive levels? Or is your main focus the social processes that build on top of those? In case the former applies:

The spec defines a module/cpan namespace mechanism. There have been many pre-implementation related discussions on #perl6, especially over the last year. FROGGS wrote up some rough notes a few months ago. More recently, lizmat, who was part of the recent Perl 5 QA hackathon focused on CPAN, has begun working on implementation for Rakudo. She posted Goal for supporting auth / version / name in module / class / grammar ? earlier today.

If you have input on any of this, please consider visiting the #perl6 IRC channel on freenode.net.

Writing Perl6 that is indistinguishable from Perl5.

Heh. I think it's fair to say that if you do a pull request of a patch that passes relevant tests, you have likely contributed even if it doesn't get committed as is. Several major #perl6 contributors are also well known as friendly teachers of Perl programming, both 5 + 6, so you may find writing an initial patch Perl 5 style is a great way to get free feedback that teaches you Perl 6.

Another option is learning some part of the Perl 6 codebase so you can help debug it and produce small patches. This commit from 4 days ago consisted of adding two characters but had a huge pay off. Several people collaborated to locate the problem, read the code, and figure out the short and long term fixes. So, not typical, but shows that simply learning to read Perl 6 and help debug code can be a very valuable contribution. (And there's also doc, tests, and so on of course.)

Revealing the limits of my IQ by not utilizing Perl6 metaops and such to the fullest.

Heh. What do you think might be done to make you feel more relaxed about that sort of thing?

Acquiring another set of modules I don’t have time to maintain.

I hereby command you not to acquire any Perl 6 modules. :)

Getting flamed/embarrassed/called-out or having to listen, even from the sidelines, to another lecture/argument about how Perl6 is TEH FUTUR or the END O’DAYS depending on where you sit.

Those sorts of conversations pretty much don't happen on #perl6. Folk are busy contributing or having fun/worthwhile discussions. It's a very productive atmosphere. You may have noticed that #perl6ers like Moritz Lenz seldom mention Perl 6 on PerlMonks despite that being their main focus. So one solution is to ignore the trolling that happens outside #perl6 and focus on finishing the product.

(Of course, that begs the question of why I'm posting this meditation. My response is that I haven't yet concluded that no one on PerlMonks is interested in contributing to Perl 6, and I'm currently willing to navigate among the trolls.)

Thanks for commenting. I hope my reply was helpful.

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Re^3: To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on May 12, 2013 at 23:20 UTC

    All my reasons were either selfish or insecure. :P I thought the little hackathon/tutorial thingy for perl6 the other day came off very well and it got me to install perl6 on my new box and at work and poke around and try some of the problems/solutions. I didn’t get very far for lack of time (was a work day after all) but I see perl6 as a viable development tool already and didn’t the last time I really tried about 2 years ago. Speed and error messages are vastly improved and that was my major complaint before. The new built-in “REPL” and .perl alone are super inviting.

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