Hmmm...This doesn't seem to have particularly grabbed the popular
imagination among the Perl6 crowd. Let me ask something a little
more concrete and see if that gets us to ignition, otherwise it's
probably not feasible.
Assume that I'm going to create, host, and maintain a small website
that explains where Perl6 stands and how it got there. The message
of this site is essentially marketing (oh no, he used the "M-
word"!!!). The message is:
- We are a serious project, not a toy or a research effort
- We can be counted on to release a 1.0 in a reasonable timeframe,
- We can solve real problems in ways that are better than anything
else out there
Here are some questions I would need help answering (many of them are
restatements of each other):
- Why are we creating a new language?
- Why should people be interested in Perl6 when (Python | Ruby | Java
| C# | $other_language) already exists and probably fills their needs?
- What are the major new features that we want to include?
- Continuations
- Coroutines
- Redefinable language grammars
- Regexen that are a grammar as opposed to a minilanguage
- MMD
- Junctions
- ???
- Why do we want each of these features, beyond "Because it's shiny"?
- Having any one of the above features would probably be a good
thing. Is there extra leverage to getting 2+ of them in
combination? E.g. does all(continuations, MMD) give you a >2x
multiplier in terms of any(expressiveness, power, Anything) over just
one(contininuations, MMD)?
- The initial estimate for how long it would take was "one year for
design, 2-3 years for implementation". We're now at five years and
still doing design. What happened?
- Why should people regard us as anything other than vaporware?
- What real, useful projects are being done in Perl6 right now?
- What real, useful *commercial* projects are being done in Perl6
right now?
- Other questions that might be useful?
--Dks
