[chromatic]

How can you write "Perl 6 will never ship"? Rakudo has monthly stable releases; last week they released their 17th stable release in a row.

(If you believe that a group of people who've demonstrated that they can make and meet commitments over a long period of time will suddenly stop, how can you believe that any group of people will ever release any software that takes longer than a week or two to write?)

[rjurney]

Its been a long time in development, and is completely dependent on a stable Parrot - something very few people use. Its been almost 10 years, I just don't think it will ship 1.0. DNF.

I think Perl 5 will take the good parts, and use them, and that Perl 6 is a pure R&D platform. Moose being a good example.

I would love to be wrong. But in the meanwhile I can't even work with other people my age in the language of choice because none of them know Perl.

It sucks.

[chromatic]

People said we'd never release Parrot 1.0 either (people said that as recently as November) -- but why speculate when you can measure?

We released Parrot 1.0 in March. We released Parrot 1.1 in April. We released Parrot 1.2 in May. We'll release Parrot 2.0 in January 2010 and Parrot 3.0 in January 2011.

Keep that in mind as you look at the daily Rakudo status reports. As of last week, Rakudo passed 68% of the current spectests. The passing test velocity has only increased this year.

[rjurney]

Calling it Parrot 1.0 doesn't mean its stable. You can call it 10.0, doesn't mean people are gonna switch.

I'm not as well informed as you, but I'm just really skeptical about a 10 year old project shipping 1.0. I'm pissed off that Perl has died in the meanwhile. Something went terribly wrong and the language was mis-managed.

[chromatic]

What else would we call Parrot 1.0? We believe that Parrot 1.0 represents a stable platform on which people can start to build compilers.

It's not a finished platform (which is why we continue to produce new releases), but we have a documented and well-understood deprecation policy.

We'll add new features, but we believe that the current set of features in Parrot 1.0 is sufficient to build a workable language.

(As for the question of "Is Perl dead?", the rate of uploads to the CPAN certainly disagrees. That's a measurable data point. I won't address the question of Perl 5's release policy and backwards compatibility concerns here; I've discussed them at length elsewhere.)

[rjurney]

Why didn't Perl 6 just use the JVM? Why did you decide to build Parrot?

As to CPAN uploads: Nobody I know under 30 in Atlanta knows Perl. I'm not exaggerating. Thats the important data point to me.

[chromatic]

That's a very silly data point for several reasons.

First, the age of 30 is arbitrary, unless there's some reason that only the experiences of people under 30 matters. Perhaps everyone over 30 stops coding, or dies, or fails to create anything interesting -- but you haven't demonstrated that.

Second, the choice of Atlanta is arbitrary. Is Atlanta a sufficient statistical representative of all of the locations of programmers in the world?

Third, your choice of "people I know" is arbitrary. Can you demonstrate that you know a representative sample of available programmers in the Atlanta area? (What happens if you expand the definition of "programmers" to include "people who occasionally write a program"?)

Fourth, your experience doesn't compare. An anecdote is not a piece of data.

The rate of change on the CPAN is not the sole determinant of Perl's viability, but there is a single, well-understood place to share reusable code with other Perl programmers. It's measurable data, and it's normative for certain types of Perl usage.

What you provided isn't data. It's just noise.

[Zaak]

> Why didn't Perl 6 just use the JVM? Why did you decide to build Parrot?

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=142797

[brunov]

I'm 24 and I code in Perl 5. Do I count in your poll, or do I have to live in Atlanta?

[chorny]

Python 3 was developed 10 years, Perl 6 development started later and it is more complex redesign.