I personally think this is an excellent idea. It provides insight (directly or indirectly) into the development process and it gives us a taste of what's to come.
O'Reilly and the authors should be commended for this. Publishing an internals book isn't going to make them much money, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if they lost money on it. What it does do is make the subject more accessible to others while creating additional interest in the development of a great project.
I'm not sure what your objection to this is. Do you really think it's just a money grab? If so, you need a serious economics lesson. Perhaps you think the development direction will change and the book will become obselete? Maybe, but so what? People will have learned from it. That knowledge will exist long past any trend in programming. Which reminds me of a quote from 'Adding a Dimension' by Isaac Asimov:
A number of years ago, when I was a freshly appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry for a man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science-in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat at the very center of the glow.
In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.
I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the "growing edge"; the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.
Come to think of it, maybe the quote isn't all that relevant; but I like it nonetheless.
Now I've forgot my point again, so I'll just end by saying, hats off to Allison Randal, Dan Sugalski, and Leopold Tötsch for writing the book and to O'Reilly for publishing it.
Have a nice day :)
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I thought "release often, release early" was meant for the software, not the supporting material. /flamebait
If what you are saying here is "wait until you have a production ready piece of software, and then run circles around yourself trying to document it", I think that's a bad idea. If you want to wait for a finished language, then don't read the apocs, or the exigeses, and wait for the p6 camel. If you are trying to flame, well, hrmph. I bit it hook line and sinker ;-)
--dug
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