On Wed, Aug 02, 2000 at 02:47:25AM -0400, John Tobey wrote:
> The schedule is just to get something down, to start fleshing out my
> idea and maybe provoke other people into starting on their own
> visions, as Simon Cozens has (though he seems to deny it) done with
> GLib and Sapphire.
Oh boy. Once again, I very deliberately did not make any huge advancements
or rethinking in Sapphire. It was a pure-and-simple proof of concept: this
is how much you can do in a week if you use already existing libraries.
I could, if I wanted to, build up a full Perl 5 interpreter out of Sapphire.
Maybe it would have safe signals and threads, or who knows what. Maybe it
would run at one tenth of the speed.
OK. Let's be perfectly honest. It's no secret I was really somewhat fed up
with the way Perl 6 was being done. I'm still not 100% convinced about the
darned thing, but I can't *not* work on Perl. It's in my blood now. So,
yeah, at the time, I was bloody-minded enough to want to do a Perl on my own
and get it right. [implied: ", dammit!"] But even on purely selfish grounds,
that's a very dumb idea - walking away from a community and forking its
project is a really good way to get yourself hated, fast. (Ask Theo DeRaadt
some time...)
So Sapphire's role changed. It became a demonstration exercise to show people
that my suggestion of using external libraries not only had merit, but that I
was convinced of this enough to it to sit down for a week and code up a real
example of its merit. It has - I hope - achieved that role. Now it's time for
me to actually try and make myself useful. I still have grave reservations
about the whole deal, so I'm making myself useful in less direct ways - I'm
hoping we'll take perverse as the version control system, if I finish it and
if it comes up to scratch. I'm not throwing myself at anything quite yet.
Sometimes, like Theo did, you can fork the project and come up with a better
end product. But Theo did that because he couldn't work with the community.
(Well, the community couldn't work with Theo, but it comes to the same thing.)
Bringing your ideas to the community is always better than shouting "Well,
screw you all, I'll do it *my* way". No matter *HOW* good your way is.
If they won't listen, that's a different story.
But I trust Larry, I trust Dan, I trust Skud and I trust Nat to listen.
--
Jenkinson's Law:
It won't work.
