On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Darren Duncan<dar...@darrenduncan.net> wrote: > Timothy, you raise a good point... > [discussion] > I think this can be made to work without much fuss
I'm curious about these sorts of conversations, and the way the community works in relation to them. I'm also curious about this specific conversation, and the ability (or otherwise) to get a facsimile of what we want by using existing P6 specc'd features, especially morphing the grammar, and macros. ---- First, about this conversation and the way the community works... We just had a bunch of threads touching on this stuff. Larry++ then made a change to the spec. Notably, @/Larry didn't post within the discussions I read and made the spec change while discussions were still going strong, with ingenious, fresh, thinking. (That suggests to me that he/they were trying to shut down debate, presumably due to viewing it as bike shedding, at a time when such could be considered ever more dangerous, perception- and productivity- wise. Leadership in an anarchist context is a tough role!) Despite @/Larry's move, you have continued, and I appreciate that, and hope @Larry are still paying some attention. ---- Second, I'm hoping that @Larry are confident we'll get more or less what we want in the end, due to POD power and/or grammar morphing and/or macros and/or some other features we haven't thought about. I'm hoping that, rather than that what's happening is that @Larry are running out of time and patience (although that would be quite understandable!). There have been many of these comments discussions over the years. In particular, a notable multi year long exchange, best represented by Mark Overmeer and Damian Conway, about how best to weave documentation and code. Indeed, this issue goes way back and way deep; I recall Ward Cunningham's promotion of 'literate programming' in the mid 90s, in which, iirc, he talked of Donald Knuth's promotion in the 70s of the idea of code and comments being woven extremely closely together such that neither is dominant, and one can actually turn things inside out and have code embedded in commentary rather than the other way around. A radical paradigm indeed! Anyhoo, I'd love to see a session of brainstorming, with nitty gritty detail, about possible ways to get what you guys and Mark and I and perhaps others think we would like to see in the way of super tightly woven together comments and code, where said brainstorming initially works within the creative constraint of leveraging the P6 spec as is, plus reasonable extrapolation of unspecced bits. Think grammar morphing, aspects of macros, the existing unfinished POD6 spec, and any other relevant existing bits I'm forgetting. Did that make sense? Anyone interested? ;) -- love, raiph
