On 11/23/2011 02:58 PM, Richard Hainsworth wrote:
My response to the original poster was NOT to his first question, but in response to the rather acidic follow up. (His first email was answered by a respectful pointer to the position the perl6 developers have regarding 'the question'.)
That is fair enough. On a second reading, I can see how the OP's second email did sound a bit bitter. I do not wish to encourage acidic posts, as I realize that they are rarely productive.
Since I read your email as a response to the first question, I hope you will understand why I thought you were avoiding the question.
In addition, let me say this. It has been over five years since perl6 was first mooted and progress has been slow. But slow progress and justifications for the slow progress are not excuses. Some things do take a long time.
I might appreciate Perl 6 better if I understood this better. I am naive about language development, so I might be wrong in feeling that 11.5 years is a long time between the initial announcement and production implementations. I would guess that other languages like C, Java, Fortran and Python did not take 12 years from initial planning to full implementation.
Wanting perl6 to be finished will not help it happen. Nor will acidic comments.
Very true.
I am responding to these questions because I think it will help rakudo to evolve faster if the work of the developers is placed in context and their achievements are praised.
That sounds reasonable. I would like to have more context. I do think that a lot of people are surprised at the delay. Last time I mentioned Perl 6 to a colleague he laughed and basically suggested that the project was dead. That made me very sad. I think Perl 6 has several interesting things in it.
Will perl6 miss the boat? Will other teams achieve what perl6 cant? These are entirely different questions to 'Is perl6 production ready?'.
Yes, they are.
The evidence demonstrates that the factors for the take up of a language are not dependent on timing. The popularity of perl5 appears by some measures to be falling and what I think are inferior languages, such as javascript, have become more popular. A response to those questions involves a philosophical debate ranging far beyond 'is perl6 production ready?' This is not a list for such questions.
Javascript has the advantage of being in the browser. The only thing I like about Javascript is that it is a functional language, but it is not a terribly well designed one.
Cheers, Daniel. -- I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.
