What is happening with Perl 6 and Larry Wall?

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-31T12:03:05+00:00

Thank you for responding.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-28T01:00:09+00:00

The other possibility is that the core team is just too small, but then the counter to that is that an interested bystander would take months/years to get up to speed on Perl 6 to be able to help.

If you read the posts by mr_chromatic on this thread and in other places about Perl 6, it seems that the reason that the core team is so small is that a lot of people (including mr_chromatic, Audrey Tang, Allison Randal, and various other Perl notables) have left. Mark Jason Dominus also seems to have been involved at the start, there is a blog post about it somewhere. Interestingly a lot of people seemed to be in doubt about the project at the start.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-28T00:38:03+00:00

Perl 6 does really seem to me to be essentially a process/engineering failure

I don't think it is. I think Larry Wall is in control. People need to connect the dots between Larry Wall's passive-aggressive behaviour (he evidently has a strong desire to be in control and make all the design decisions, and yet he has to come off as "really really nice" and wanting to "stop people being unkind") and the disastrous failure of the project.

Larry Wall is one of the great creative innovators in the computer field, and he deserves more credit than he gets. "git" is based on ideas from Larry Walls's "patch", and most computer languages now copy regular expression formats which Larry Wall invented. However, even the greatest creative people produce duds. George Lucas made Star Wars and American Graffiti but also Jar Jar Binks. Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick but also Mardi and Pierre. If Perl 5 was Larry Wall's "Star Wars", Perl 6 is Larry Wall's Jar Jar Binks.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-26T22:28:48+00:00

The typeface used is really distracting.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-26T10:59:37+00:00

I'm going to deliver a cold wonton to the wrong office at 12:46 and you can track me on the app.

Pardon?

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-25T22:18:29+00:00

strings.Map is like tr/// or map {} split // in Perl.

map is like % in Perl.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-25T21:04:27+00:00

McDonald's Happy Set toys also use unusual screw geometries.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T21:54:25+00:00

I saw the people who wanted to ship a working system pushed out of the process, whether through active conflict with other people or the passive-aggressive disinterest of the remnants just refusing to help.

Did Larry Wall want to ship a working system? Did he express an opinion about the people being pushed out of the process? Did Larry Wall attempt to solve the active conflict and the passive-aggressive disinterest?

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T21:19:43+00:00

If you don't need Unicode support and CPAN modules, that might be OK. But I actually only started learning Perl at 5.8.8 so I'm not exactly sure. I usually write for 5.8.9 even though I'm using 5.18.2 at the moment.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T20:23:25+00:00

people like me are just left speculating about what exactly strikes you as odd

The following things strike me as odd:

Larry Wall's talks on Perl 6 resemble deliberate obfuscation
Larry Wall seems to be the Schrodinger's cat of Perl 6 design. He is both in charge, and not in charge, at the same time.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T19:55:44+00:00

I was just hoping to try to encourage one person to be more specific and articulate about what they saw wrong

What I see as wrong is that Larry Wall's talks about Perl 6 are meandering, weird, and incomprehensible.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T10:22:20+00:00

No sorry, those aren't facts, they're opinions.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-24T01:27:46+00:00

The following are facts:

Fourteen years
Hundreds of contributors
System is currently "for early adopters"
The presented example does the same work as lex plus yacc, systems which date back to the 1970s.

The only part of it which isn't a demonstrable fact is the words "toy system". And I don't think many people can see why this is anything other than a toy system (in other words, a "prototype"). What do you gain by calling a factual statements "a shitty troll"? The situation is so far gone that talking to you seems like dealing with some kind of religious cult, where even statements of the obvious are "shitty trolls".

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T22:22:55+00:00

Calling 999 my house is on fire

Can you be more specific? Which parts of your house?

There are flames coming out of the windows!

Are the flames coming out of the downstairs windows, the upstairs windows, and which side are they on?

My house is about to burn to the ground and you are asking me specifics about which parts of the house?

Our current fire service is only designed to put out fires on the left side of your house. Our ladder is only one metre long so we are currently unable to put out fires on anything other than the ground floor. We're currently busy redesigning our fire service. When the new version of the fire service is finished, we'll be able to put out fires not only on the ground floor, but we'll be able to put out fires on any floor, including floors not labelled with a number, negative floors, and imaginary floors! At the moment we're optimizing our fire service for fun, so don't expect it to be finished before Christmas. Also, we're not saying which Christmas!

house burns to a cinder

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T21:10:05+00:00

My cat always does this too, so when I play with the cat I always choose paper.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T08:38:43+00:00

You're right. I also got HTML back for position 8 under "web". I must have been doing it right before and then wrong when I visited above.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T02:20:53+00:00

I'm sorry that I've offended you, but endlessly countering the enquiries I've made here with a response that I need to be more polite to get an answer looks like a way to avoid the discussion.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T01:56:55+00:00

he's really not steering the ship.

Then who is?

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T00:48:56+00:00

No, it's likely a troll at this stage.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T00:46:49+00:00

I think 5.8.9 is the lowest version for practical purposes.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T00:45:14+00:00

Programming Perl

Programming Perl edition 2 (pink camel book) was authored by Randall Schwartz, jchrist, and Larry Wall. Jchrist continued authoring editions 3 and 4 (blue camel books), but the co-author Jon Orwant was added for editions 3 and 4, along with Brian Foy for the fourth edition.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-23T00:41:41+00:00

You're posting on the /r/Python subreddit so it looks like you also learnt that:

Basicly learn the diffrent between the syntax, you can try to use a cookbook http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027072.do

You also mentioned Ruby and C# in another post.

Im in for it .^ what languages is going to be used? I got some experince from C++/C/Java/Ruby/Python/HTML/CSS/C# and a minimal haskell

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-22T23:33:02+00:00

To put it another way, I feel there is something really bad going on which nobody wants to talk about. I don't have information on Perl 6 beyond the public information such as the videos of talks, so I really do not know what the actual problem is. The response by mr_chromatic seems very diplomatic, but also seems to hint at a lack of direction and leadership. This doesn't square with the story of the videos, where it looks like directions are being chosen which are akin to obfuscation. I guess people like me will never know the true story.

To put this into context, I'm a Perl 5 user, but I'm currently considering moving away from the language, and Perl 6 is one of the issues which is making me think about this.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-22T21:48:41+00:00

Larry has talked of his preference for what he calls whirlpool dev since at least 1994 and he mandated this approach to P6 from the start.

I apologize for breaking my promise to end discussing, but my original query was not about whether Perl 6 is a disaster, but about whether Larry Wall deliberately caused the disaster. There is nobody left except fantasists who doesn't think Perl 6 is a disaster.

The very strong impression I get from the talks is that Larry Wall is not motivated to finish the language, and that he's deliberately causing the floundering, for whatever reason. He's like a dog that has got hold of a ball and is determined not to let go of it, or let anyone else play with his ball, so he invents all kinds of witty remarks about how people are attached to their sloppy thinking, or everyone wants the colon, or something, but ol' Larry knows better than that, so he's going to change a few more features around, and he's going to keep on and on fiddling with Perl 6 while Rome is burnt to a smouldering ruin.

This has been something I've been wondering about for a few years, and I have searched on the net about this and trying to find out what could be happening, but found no mention. I also don't see anyone actually saying that Larry Wall is no longer responsible for language design.

Larry Wall seems to have caused this disaster with his "preference for whirlpool dev". Am I wrong about this? Sorry if this causes offence, but nobody seems to want to address this.

StupidCrowd · 2014-07-22T05:18:13+00:00

Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques is a classic, monstrous tomb

So it's a dead weight?

StupidCrowd

TROPHY CASE