RFC: Community Education Page

[David K Storrs]

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

Re: RFC: Community Education Page

[Doug McNutt]

At 11:34 -0400 5/7/06, David K Storrs wrote:
>Hmmm...This doesn't seem to have particularly grabbed the popular  imagination 
>among the Perl6 crowd.

I'm a lurker here, mostly interested in keeping perl 6 usable for mathematics 
and physics, but unable to keep up with most of the things I read.

What I KNOW about perl 6 comes from "Perl 6 Essentials" First Edition, June 
2003. That's how I got here. The >>+<< "vector" operators were giving me fits.

I suspect there are copyright issues but an O'Reilly style "bookshelf" in an 
open source way that would provide continuous updates to Essentials would 
really be nice. I occasionally try to understand a thread by looking there but, 
at 3 years old, it rarely does any good.

-- 
-->  There are 10 kinds of people:  those who understand binary, and those who 
don't <--

Re: using the newer collection types

[Sam Vilain]

Darren Duncan wrote:

>>Also, I don't agree with the notion of a "header" of each relation. It
>>has a type for each tuple item, sure, but "header" just sounds like the
>>sort of thing you want in a ResultSet, not a Relation.
>>Sam.
>>
>>
>A relation's heading is essentially the definition of the relation's 
>structure, and is not redundant if the relation has no tuples in it, 
>which is valid.
>  
>

The Relation has a type, which is a Relation of Tuples of something. The
"Header" you refer to is the higher order part of the Tuple, the
"something".

Sam.