Well, THAT was certainly specific, insightful, politely phrased, and
filled with pertinent advice on how to remedy the problem!
Alan, you're right about certain things...it's important that talented,
experienced people have the final say over the final product. However,
most of the problems in every field of human endeavor come down to the
fact that there just aren't very many talented, experienced people. What
that means is that we take our top people, enshrine them as design gods,
approvers of submitted code, and coders of RHP (Really Hard Problems), and
then we allow as many enthusiastic people as possible to try to solve the
less hard problems...the best of these attempts gets used, the rest get
thrown out by the top people. Yes, it's a lot of work for them and no,
it's not really what anyone would choose in an ideal world, but it's
proven to work...unless, of course, you'd call Linux a "slow motion train
wreck."
The other reason to do it this way is that if we DON'T let new (==
"less experienced") people help out, how are they ever going to get more
experienced at the problems that we need solved? And if the pool of
available experienced people never grows, how is Perl supposed to survive?
Dave
(PS: I do not by any stretch of the imagination include myself in the
list of "top people.")
On Sun, 10 Sep 2000, Alan Burlison wrote:
> Nathan Torkington wrote:
>
> > We're lucky to have the experience of Chip to draw upon (he's already
> > blazed some of the trails we'll be turning into fully-paved four-lane
> > highways with Waffle Houses and Conocos), as well as a lot of people
> > who've worked with perl5. They know what works and what doesn't,
> > and experience is going to be invaluable in something as complicated
> > as a Perl interpreter.
>
> Unfortunately the greatest volume on the various p6 sublists tends to be
> coming from the least experienced people. The comments based on common
> sense and long experience tend to be lost in the hubbub of uninformed
> noise. In retrospect I think the various sublists should have been
> moderated and read-only, and have been populated with the handful of
> people who understand most about a given area - and no, I don't include
> myself in that list of people, although I would have liked to have
> listened in.
>
> The whole p6 process is more bizarre than bazaar, and I really can't see
> how on earth a useful product is going to come out of it. Interest and
> enthusiasm are great attributes, but in the end are no substitute for
> knowledge and experience. If p6 is to be successful it needs to be
> carefully designed and meticulously implemented. To do this
> successfully it will need rigorous selection of the people carrying out
> the work. This will inevitably mean that some people will be left on
> the sidelines, and when that happens a lot of the current enthusiasm
> will I fear turn to bitterness and disillusionment.
>
> I feel it is grossly unfair to carry on this pretence of development by
> brownian motion any longer, and that it is about time that the p6 core
> developers (you know who you are!) started to be honest about this. A
> lot of people will inevitably be disappointed when their enthusiastic
> contributions are discarded, and I have seen absolutely no discussion of
> the process by which RFCs will be accepted or rejected (and saying
> 'Larry will do it' isn't good enough). I've seen endless and
> stultifying discussions of code repository tools, but very little talk
> of project teams and deliverables.
>
> The most difficult part of this process is sorting out the human issues,
> not the technical issues, but that is the very area that seems to have
> received least discussion. The body of code that comes out at the end
> of the process is nothing like as important as the group of people who
> are responsible for giving birth to it, but at the moment the focus and
> priorities seem to be completely awry.
>
> I'm sure the immediate response to my comments is that I'm being
> unnecessarily pessimistic, and indeed I hope I am. However, past bitter
> experience tells me that I'm probably at least partly correct, so please
> don't discard my comments out of hand.
>
> I'm sorry but I really can't stomach watching this slow motion train
> wreck any longer, so good luck and goodbye.
>
> Alan Burlison
>
