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by chromatic 4155 days ago
some people would rather ... complain from the peanut gallery than they would help it move forward.

That's not entirely fair. Some of us doubters spent a lot of time, energy, and resources trying to help it move forward before deciding it wasn't worth it.
2 comments
kbenson 4155 days ago
Have you been checking it out at all again, or are you considering it? It's been my secret hope for a long time that you would get involved again, if not at the compiler level then at the community and ecosystem level. Your blog[1] was always insightful and a good read, and I think the community is worse without it being active. I'm talking about Perl 6 here, but I could say the same for Perl 5 and it would be at least as true.

1: http://modernperlbooks.com/

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chromatic 4155 days ago
Have you been checking it out at all again, or are you considering it?

No. I have my doubts about yet another announcement and nothing I've seen since I stopped contributing suggests that the project will provide anything I need that I can't get better elsewhere.

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pekk 4155 days ago
I'm interested in why you removed "stagnate and die" from that quote.

The problem I described is when people actually prefer to kill a project through stagnation than to help it move forward - often by active resistance to any real change. Living projects periodically change. Even goals like improving speed often require redesigns and replacements of old components. When the process of change and renewal is shut down or nobody contributes to it, everyone starts wandering off and the project dies.

I'm not a developer of Perl. I'm sure all your input was appreciated by someone. It's a personal decision whether you want to keep putting in that effort, or switch to other tools. I just don't see any sense in attacking Perl 6 any more.

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chromatic 4155 days ago
I'm interested in why you removed "stagnate and die" from that quote.

I have strong opinions that people in situations similar to mine had no intent of contributing to "stagnation" or "death". Quite the opposite.

When the process of change and renewal is shut down or nobody contributes to it, everyone starts wandering off and the project dies.

Certainly. I also think that a project which actively chases away contributors ought to account for that eventually.

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brrt 4155 days ago
I think that the perl6 project is quite welcoming of contributors. So I'm honestly curious to know what happened to make you feel otherwise.
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kbenson 4155 days ago
Chromatic was very big with both Perl 6 and Parrot development a long time ago. My understanding of it, having followed both projects for close to a decade, is that it came down to what was the "right" choice for one project was not the "right" choice for the other, and the schism this caused as it happened a few times left some people soured. I think both sides had cause for their actions and have cause for their feelings, but I don't really think either party did anything wrong. Such is life, shit happens, it's not fair.

Chromatic may disagree more or less on some points above, but as someone who followed along from the outside, reading blog posts and IRC chats of both parties over years, that's how I interpreted it.

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chromatic 4155 days ago
I've already written about that at length several times here and elsewhere.
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