in reply to Re: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk in thread A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
People who criticize you are not your enemies but your friends, indirectly they give you a temperature check of whats brimming in the community.
To be clear, I'm extremely welcoming of honest criticism.
But oft-repeated, off-the-cuff speculations that fail to demonstrate
even basic critical thinking skills (such as evidence, reasoning,
and a person's ability to self-check their own statements)
do not qualify as "friendly criticism". They're just FUD.
You are right no body really understands the complexity behind what you are trying to build. But ask yourself this question, How are they to understand when you haven't told it to them?
IMO, this is more FUD ("Nobody is talking about Perl 6"). Here's an off-the-cuff and horribly incomplete list for 2009, in no particular order:
- Perl 6 Advent Calendar
- Practically all of Larry Wall's keynote addresses and invited talks
- Piers Cawley, Healthcheck Perl: The Perl Future, Heise online
- Tim Bunce, Perl Myths 2009, ossbarcamp
- Alex Handy, Rakudo provides Perl 6 preview, SD Times
- Carl Masak, 3D, baby!
- Daniel Ruoso, Perl 6 - The quest for the holy grail, FISL 10
- Moritz Lenz, Perl 6 in 2009, Linux Today
- Moritz Lenz, What you can write in Perl 6 today
- Perl 6 due in spring 2010 - some of it anyway, Heise Online
- Daniel Carrera, The Josephus problem in Perl 6, Python and Ruby
- Chris Dolan, Using Rakudo grammars, Frozen Perl 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 today, Frozen Perl 2009
- Gabor Szabo, Hands-on Perl 6 training, Nordic Perl Workshop 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, The Perl 6 Express, Nordic Perl Workshop 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, Nordic Perl Workshop 2009
- Carl Masak, Beauty and chaos: the story of November, Nordic Perl Workshop, 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, Nordic Perl Workshop, 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, There's more than one way to dispatch it, Nordic Perl Workshop, 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 today, YAPC::NA 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 regexes and grammars, YAPC::NA 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, YAPC::NA 2009
- Jeff Horwitz, Using and contributing to mod_perl6, YAPC::NA 2009
- Morris Siegel, Enhancing Perl 6 pattern-matching with ideas from Snobol4, YAPC::NA 2009
- Damian Conway, Perl 6: Why? What? How?, OSCON 2009
- Larry Wall and Damian Conway, Perl 6 Update, OSCON 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, OSCON 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, OSCON 2009
- Damian Conway, Perl 6 update, YAPC::EU 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl 6, YAPC::EU 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, Perl 6 roles in depth, YAPC::EU 2009
- Martin Berends, Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers, YAPC::EU 2009
- Carl Masak, Perl 6 ♥ the Web, YAPC::EU 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, The Perl 6 Express, Belgian Perl Workshop 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, Solved in Perl 6, YAPC::Asia 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, The Way to Rakudo *, YAPC::Asia 2009
- Jonathan Worthington, Solved in Perl 6, Italian Perl Workshop 2009
- Dan Kogai, Perl? Which Perl?, YAPC::Asia 2009
- Szabo Gabor, Getting Started with Perl 6
- Szabo Gabor, Perl 6 Tricks and Treats, YAPC::Asia 2009
There's a ton more, of course. We're at conferences, we're writing articles and press releases, we publish the minutes of our meetings, etc. We blog, we tweet, we have Perl 6 RSS feeds, we're part of Perl Iron Man. Just because you're apparently not seeing the buzz doesn't mean there isn't any.
Pm
Re^3: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
by mj41 (Sexton) on Apr 23, 2010 at 20:46 UTC
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Re^3: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 23, 2010 at 16:17 UTC
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Yes you are writing about Perl 6, Speaking about Perl 6 etc. My point was not about that. But rather about explaining people why building a Grammar engine for Perl 6 is so difficult, as I understand that has roots in the mutable aspects of Perl 6 Grammar.
You are doing a great job, absolutely no doubts about that. But in this world you have to blow your own trumpet. Giving people a feel of(Technical matters of the compiler, not features of the language) will do a lot of help. | [reply] |
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So you want a simple explanation of why it's complex, eh?
If you don't mind complex explanations of the complexity, those can be found in the apocalypses and synopses. And some of my talks have been about why the parser is complex. I generally run out of time in such talks... :-)
For a more academic view of the complexity of what we're trying to do, here are some other people trying to do (some of) the same things with a different language, Fortress:
"Growing a Syntax".
It's easy to argue that we could have done this or that differently, and spend even more energy arguing whether those things were actually possible at the time or would have simply resulted in other dystopias. But the fact is that, within the constraints of health, sanity, and politics, we took the best shot at it we knew how, and our decisions, right or wrong, have put us where we are today, with a great deal of improvement in both Perl 5 and Perl 6 over the last ten years, in absolute terms.
It's the relative worth of Perl with respect to other languages, and the perceptions and misperceptions of that worth, and the perceptions and misperceptions of other people's perceptions and misperceptions, that drives people's fears.
And "Fear is the mind killer."
So I simply say, "Don't do that." Regardless of our mistakes and our perceived mistakes, the Perl 5 and Perl 6 communities will both continue to prosper, because we have iron-willed people who are not going to give up. You can't change the past. You can't even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives. My father always used to say "It's not what you do, it's what you do next." So let's all look toward the future, and keep on doing the next thing, and the next, and the next.
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because we have iron-willed people who are not going to give up.
Memento mori!
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My point was not about that. But rather about explaining people why building a Grammar engine for Perl 6 is so difficult, as I understand that has roots in the mutable aspects of Perl 6 Grammar.
Okay then - restricting myself to my 2009 list above - these are the ones that cover why the grammar engine for Perl 6 is so difficult/special/unique/important:
- Perl 6 Advent Calendar (specifically Day 24: The Perl 6 standard grammar, Day 21: Grammars and Actions, and Day 10: A Regex Story)
- Practically all of Larry Wall's keynote addresses and invited talks
- Chris Dolan, Using Rakudo grammars, Frozen Perl 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, Nordic Perl Workshop 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, Nordic Perl Workshop, 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Perl 6 regexes and grammars, YAPC::NA 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Hacking Rakudo Perl, YAPC::NA 2009
- Morris Siegel, Enhancing Perl 6 pattern-matching with ideas from Snobol4, YAPC::NA 2009
- Larry Wall and Damian Conway, Perl 6 Update, OSCON 2009
- Patrick Michaud, Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, OSCON 2009
- Damian Conway, Perl 6 update, YAPC::EU 2009
Not from my earlier list, we should probably include (still in 2009):
And, of course, I've been talking and giving grammar engine specific talks since YAPC::NA in 2005, because (as chromatic++ said in the other thread) that's what ends up being important to completing a Perl 6 implementation.
... in this world you have to blow your own trumpet.
See the lists above for the concerts you missed in 2009. :-)
Giving people a feel of(Technical matters of the compiler, not features of the language) will do a lot of help.
Part of what makes Perl 6 so special is that the technical matters of the compiler are features of the language. That's what makes it possible to write Perl 6 (as well as many other languages) in Perl 6, and have operator overloading, and metaoperators, and macros, etc. That's why almost every talk about "how to build a language using Parrot / Perl 6" or "Perl 6 regular expressions" ultimately ends up demonstrating the underlying complexity of the grammar engine.
Pm
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Re^3: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
by LanX (Saint) on Apr 23, 2010 at 15:41 UTC
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>> You are right no body really understands the complexity behind what you are trying to build. But ask yourself this question, How are they to understand when you haven't told it to them?
>IMO, this is more FUD ("Nobody is talking about Perl 6"). Here's an off-the-cuff and horribly incomplete list for 2009, in no particular order:
Sorry, but how many of these posts are talking about the complexity behind Perl 6?
I know some of the people and read a lot from them, I also read Dan Sugalski's blog from start till burnout.
I suppose most of these posts have the aim to keep people interested and get them involved and NOT to lower expectations or criticizing the complexity.
This is for sure a fantastic project, but we should start getting realistic about it.
The Perl community could have massive boost just by making a big release with "boring features"¹ but could then easily challenge the "sex appeal" from Ruby and Python.
Just like a plane is followed regularly by a bigger plane to keep the market interested and not by a rocket.
And I'm sure this major release would
a) put lots of pressure away from your team and
b) build a bridge to your project by incorporating concepts
c) therefore push the further development of it!
¹) Nota bene: I don't say YOU are to implement these boring features! | [reply] |
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> I think we're way ahead of you here. I believe this is exactly what the Rakudo Star release is intended to achieve.
Ehm ... sorry I don't understand !?!
Do you intend to bundle Rakudo * with a fully functional Perl 5 engine?
Such that the gaps ( IO, CPAN-Moduls, time-critical parts, *) can be filled with help of the Perl 5 or Perl 6 can be embedded in Perl 5 code?
What will be the difference to the Perl 6 bundled with Padre?
I was talking about an improved evolution of Perl 5 ...
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Re^3: A wholly inadequate reply to an Anonymous Monk
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 25, 2010 at 01:42 UTC
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if you want to never finish something you will do as much press conferences and presentations and articles as you'd like. and let chromatic write entire shelves and fill up a library of Alexandria with his books.
on the other hand when you're determined to get some stuff done, you will pull the damn ethernet plug from your computer, or close your wifi connection and go dark and just hack.
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