Raiph Mellor wrote: > The .kxxv method name is a placeholder.
Phew! Thanks for taking the time to respond and explain, Raiph. > The brief discussion that motivated introducing it is at: > http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-04-13#i_8582049 > > Larry has chimed in at: > http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-04-14#i_8582684 As I said before, I like the idea, just not the too-clever name. > Another discussion that's unfolding right now and could do with your > attention imo is: > https://github.com/perl6/specs/commit/9213b1382078fee890ab9d74223f3c7e95942837 Thanks for the pointer, though they seem to have resolved that question reasonably well now. ;-) > All of the above illustrates an issue that we ought to address, namely > where we best discuss this stuff to make the best use of your time: For the past few years I've been staying out of the discussion, quietly watching every doc commit, and commenting (either directly to Larry, or else on this list) whenever I was alarmed, confused, or worried by something. > 1. For the last few years almost all discussion is entirely on #perl6. Which seems to be working extremely well...just not for me. I can't manage to track these discussions (even via the logs). I find the interleaving of multiple threads utterly impossible to cope with. > The above arrangement works for us and $Larry. But I'm thinking we might > want to go back to @Larry with both you and him and figure out how we > make that work for you. You should first ask $Larry if he wants to go back to @Larry. ;-) Meanwhile, I'm reasonably happy being just a sanity check on spec commits. If there's greater need of me than that, perhaps I could also be a kind of evil djinn, to be conjured by emailed pointers (such as you so kindly provided) in cases of dire need. :-) > Did you see that lizmat has taken a stab at implementing 'is cached' -- > because she saw that that's the one unimplemented thing in some code > you recently published? She said she was going to raise the issue. I'm delighted to see her take it further than that. The lack of "is cached" was the sole point-of-failure in my "Perl 6 for CS" talk. > How confident are you that your all-in-one CS teaching platform concept > will be taken up by some educational institutions? What timeframe are > you thinking is involved here? Are you thinking P6 is already ready for it? I suspect that Rakudo-on-MoarVM is now (or very soon will be) fast enough and complete enough. It only needs to be sufficiently easy to install (e.g. a standard part of Rakudo*), which I understand is very close now. Of course, another 6-12 months of polishing...both of the specs and of the implementation...wouldn't go amiss either. In particular, the concurrency specs and implementation need to be a little more stable and tested. I have no confidence yet, however, that Perl 6 will be widely taken up as a CS teaching language. I think the presentation I made was compelling enough, but I've only given it at one institution, and my experience is that language decisions rarely get made on the basis of technical merit, or pedagogical merit... or even on the basis of mere pedagogical convenience. Rather, the decision on a teaching language usually reflects either the personal biases of the individual teacher, or those of the curriculum committee, or else mirrors the market demand of the local community. How else do we explain the awful languages that are so often taught in our universities. :-( > I don't think we're there yet but it seems like the perfect initial goal for > P6-as-a-product. I do think Perl 6 is an incredibly good fit for teaching both CS in general and programming paradigms in particular. And, if we could get it into schools, it would be a huge boost in its exposure and popularity. I'm going to continue to refine my presentation, and offer it at any educational institutions I can convince to host it in the various cities I will be visiting over the next twelve months. We'll see if I get any traction. Damian
