It doesn't befit the HN community to be ridiculing the Perl community.
First the Perl hackers were the original web start-ups. Many of the problems you don't have to worry about were either solved by them or were solved by people who wanted to fix things wrong with the Perl toolchain. This makes Perl a huge success in historical terms even if it on the wane today and, even if it is on the wane today, it is still used by many huge organisations.
The Perl 6 project has been a worthwhile and fascinating project to follow for the past 10 years. While many see it purely as a failure there is a lot to praise and learn from in the experiment. Here's what I have learned from watching it for most of the early years:
* Designing a new language by committee is very hard
* Keeping a community focused on creating a Minimal Viable Product can be very hard
* One bone-headed programmer can wreck a project
* Very clever people can make very stupid decisions, especially when operating in a group
* It is better to announce nothing than to announce and then not ship soon afterwards. The internet is like a child with ADHD
Having said all of that Perl 6 is working now and has some fascinating, innovative features if (to many people's taste) wrapped in some ugly and frenetic syntax.
Go read the history of Perl and Perl 6 before you just join the chorus of boots.
Especially the last two items. One being the list in the wrap-up: good advice and the other being the one about Leo—the man who single handily derailed Perl 6. One guy is pretty-much the reason we all laugh at Perl now. I watched it happen: he refused to build a MVP, he kept throwing away working code to re-architect it bigger and more convoluted ways. There's a big lesson there for every start-up.
If you do take a look be sure to read Dan's well-written blogs about language design and implementation, especially those tagged "What The Heck Is:"
I've always held a lot of respect and sadness for Dan Sugalski. The guy was not only a brilliant architect and hacker but he had the knack for always being right. It's sad that he didn't stand his ground and was sadly pushed out of the project. I get the impression he had some tough times after that.
If any of you guys see he CV come up you shouldn't think twice in giving him a senior role.
I remember reading Dan's blog religiously when I was a college student interested in language design and compiler implementation. That's where I learned about CPS and register VMs.
Anyway, I've seen him recently pop up in a professional context. I can't find anything on the Internet about where he's working now, so on the off chance he's deliberately protecting his privacy, I won't say where. But knowing what he's working on, I think he's doing fine.
Cool, thanks for those links. I'm going to give them a read.
After a quick read of a few articles....
Hmmm. This is good stuff. I want to sit down with this and read it on my Kindle. Maybe I should ping him and see if he wants to turn this in to a Leanpub book...
I think that's a great point about working towards a minimal viable product. I was shocked to read recently about all the wasted time spent doing things like implementing versions of Python and Javascript on Parrot instead of working to make happen its whole reason for existence, Perl 6.
I've just read that article and I feel there's a subtle re-writing of history going on there. I stopped following Parrot shortly after Dan Sugalski left (somewhere around 2005?).
I wasn't there before the original Parrot announcement but I did start lurking on the mailing list around 2001-2002.
I recall Parrot always being touted as an open VM for all dynamic languages (this is before dynamic languages started to appear on the Java VM). You have to put it in the context of the rumoured .Net VM that Microsoft was about to bring out—(and then did shortly after the Parrot project started to gain traction)—those of us interested in open software were keen to have our own.
Sadly Parrot stumbled and the rest is history. Mono wrote the obituary.
• The Perl 6 spec was still being argued about (plus I recall Larry had been seriously unwell).
• The intention was to create an open VM for all dynamic languages.
• Perl 5, Python, Ruby and Javascript were always targets for Parrot.
My frustration was that, instead of putting everything into creating usable Perl 5, Python and Ruby implementations (Javascript was pretty-much browser only at the time) the Parrot team faffed about with toy language after toy language.
I may have imagined this as I can't find reference to it online.
There are two Perl 6 compilers under active development. Rakudo is rather feature complete, but not very fast. Niecza is much faster, but still catching up on the features.
While I don't use them in production yet, they are very much fun to use.
It doesn't befit the HN community to be ridiculing the Perl community.
Dude!
As soon as you use the phrase "the language of the future", the mammalian-mating-ritual-inspired-games have begun!
Seriously. Different languages can and should talk about their appropriateness to different contexts. But "the future" isn't a particular context. It's more of a "I deserve more mindshare now!" statement. And while your special language might indeed deserve just that, you'll have to survive the charge of other long antlered types to prove it. Good luck in your quest but ridicule is part of the charge you'll have to survive after you enter this arena - stop frickin' whining it, just stop...
First the Perl hackers were the original web start-ups. Many of the problems you don't have to worry about were either solved by them or were solved by people who wanted to fix things wrong with the Perl toolchain. This makes Perl a huge success in historical terms even if it on the wane today and, even if it is on the wane today, it is still used by many huge organisations.
The Perl 6 project has been a worthwhile and fascinating project to follow for the past 10 years. While many see it purely as a failure there is a lot to praise and learn from in the experiment. Here's what I have learned from watching it for most of the early years:
* Designing a new language by committee is very hard
* Keeping a community focused on creating a Minimal Viable Product can be very hard
* One bone-headed programmer can wreck a project
* Very clever people can make very stupid decisions, especially when operating in a group
* It is better to announce nothing than to announce and then not ship soon afterwards. The internet is like a child with ADHD
Having said all of that Perl 6 is working now and has some fascinating, innovative features if (to many people's taste) wrapped in some ugly and frenetic syntax.
Go read the history of Perl and Perl 6 before you just join the chorus of boots.