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

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

Hey but...

Just before contributing I believe I should became a user for this product. But the last time I tried Rakudo I found myself in struggle just because of lack of documentation.

When I say 'documentation' I actually mean the full chain of 'quick getting started', 'the complete user manual', and 'internal architecture/design for hackers'. All I saw before was the type one of these, how to install and run the fresh-built binary. Yes I understand that the code itself is not yet done, but this fact is not a blocker for documentation process. I believe this needs a huge effort from developer team and especially project leads -- take as an example the OpenBSD project -- they refuse any changes if these changes are not documented.

Resuming -- no how-tos, but the complete manual is needed to gain userbase and only after that the part of it maybe became your contributors. This is just my opinion, hope it helps.

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

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Perl 6 documentation (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 16, 2013 at 20:52 UTC
Updated Nov 2013. Reformatted, tweaked content, mentioned videos and jnthn's slides. Added Dec 2013. re: 'internal architecture/design for hackers'. If you last looked more than 18 months ago, I'd say the doc situation has significantly improved. There isn't a complete manual by any means, but perhaps what is now in place is enough to get some folk up to speed. New since summer 2012 or thereabouts: There's a solid start of what may become the complete manual you seek. This is p6doc, a Perl 6 analog to Perl 5's perldoc led by Moritz Lenz. Issues and patches are welcome at its github repo (a link is in the footer of its pages). Carl Mäsak wrote a month long series of daily blogs taking the reader from an introduction to P6 through to writing a small game in P6. Carl Mäsak created and ran a Perl 6 programming competition (he's published results for knights-from-knaves and rectangle haikus). Carl Mäsak prepared and hosted the #masakism workshop teaching good programming practice in both Perl 5 and 6 (considered by him a success. He subsequently scheduled a repeat on June 19). Carl Mäsak prepared and presented three Zero to Perl 6 training sessions as part of the Perl 6 elements of YAPC::NA held in early June. Videos of at least some of these are on youtube. Gabor Szabo began building up his Perl 6 Maven site. jnthn has added many excellent PDFs corresponding to talks he's given at various conferences. (Unfortunately the index I've linked to is out of date at the time I'm writing this; please bug him on #perl6 to update it!) There are a bunch of videos on youtube. Of course, some doc related projects started more than a year ago have been further developed. Most notably, Larry Wall, with help from a few others, has pushed the count of Perl 6 Rosettacode entries to around 600. (Talking of Larry, he has said he is working toward publishing an O'Reilly book, a Perl 6 equivalent of the Perl 5 "bible" Programming Perl.) With all that said, a word of caution. If by "user" you mean relying on Perl 6 the way someone might rely on Perl 5, things are far, far from that. Perl 6 won't be able to support users and doesn't need contributors in the way that Perl 5 supports users and needs contributors; Perl 6 can only support users willing to work with it despite its many weaknesses and relatively high rate of change from release to release. Hth someone!	[reply]
Re: Perl 6 documentation (Re^2: To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?) by Anonymous Monk on Dec 24, 2013 at 17:56 UTC
"a solid start of what may become" ? What is so defective in perl-6 that you believe that is acceptible? Is that supposed to make people happier about perl-6? Why not tell people "oh the source code documents itself" and admit that you hate the users you don't have? What is so hard to admit about that?	[reply]

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