I tried, I really did, but I'm afraid that I must raise the white flag to my teacher training for the next while and give up writing the Perl 6 Summary until at least after Christmas.
I've had a great time doing this for the last two and a half years, I hope you've all enjoyed it too. It's been a privilege to see the progress that's been made with Parrot since I started. Dan, Leo and the rest of the p6i team have done fantastic work -- it's only when you stop to think about what Parrot looked like two years ago and then compare it with the recent release that you get a real sense of how far we've come. Thanks guys. Thanks to the language folks, Larry, Allison, Damian, and all the many and various denizens of perl6-language. Following the list has been an education. Every time I find myself thinking a proposal is simply poisonous, along comes Larry in fugu-chef mode to extract the good stuff that sets your mind a tingling and chuck away the stuff that would leave you paralyzed and dying on the floor. I don't know how he does it, but I'm very glad that he can. It's no wonder that p6l felt like it was spinning its wheels for a while there while Larry was busy being ill. Thanks to O'Reilly for continuing to publish the summaries on perl.com, and to Robert Spier and Ask for holding their archives on perl.org (and for all the other work they do for perl.org, including the various RT installations). The work they did in getting the perl6 lists onto groups.google.com made the task of working out appropriate URLs for messages far easier than in the bad old days. Thanks to everyone who ever sent me feedback; I've mentioned Warnock's dilemma many times in these summaries, it's always good to be gently lifted from its horns by a word or two of praise or damnation. While I'm about it, thanks to Bryan Warnock for first identifying his dilemma and for writing the original Perl 6 summaries that gave me the idea in the first place. Thanks to you all for reading, whether you sent me feedback or not. I'm not about to stop writing. I'm slowly working through chromatic's 'Write Your Life' project. It's far easier than summarizing; all the material I need is already in my head, and I can bash out words even when I don't have net access. I may not have stopped writing the summaries for good either; I just haven't got computrons to spare for writing them at the moment. But if any of you are thinking "I could do that!" then don't let me stop you -- there's an awful lot goes on on the lists, and there's a lot of interested people who don't have the time to keep up with them. A regular summary helps the interested but busy people get a grasp of how the Perl 6 project is getting on, and that can only be a good thing. Sorry things have rather fizzled out; I just didn't realise until I started quite how demanding this course would be. And I don't just mean because I've got to wear a suit. -- Piers Cawley -- Former Perl 6 Summarizer http://www.bofh.org.uk/
