Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On 01/05/2011 02:51 PM, Gabor Szabo wrote: Let me just give a probably totally irrelevant comment here. I think most of the open source projects have been in use by many people in production environment before the project had a production release. I guess there are still places that think Linux is not good for their production environment. Probably it is true for all the projects Pm mentioned but a lot of others as well. I remember I was using svn from v0.32 or so. In most technologies I am a very late early adopter. I believe Rakudo and Perl 6 will see a gradual increase in use as they improve, get faster, have more modules etc. It will probably happen a long time before any official 1.0 release will be seen. (if ever) It is very frustrating that the progress is so slow and I can't yet use it for my daily work. It would make both my programming life and my marketing life a lot easier if I could use Rakudo at my clients. But can I seriously complain about the slow progress? Have I made a lot (or any) effort to help Rakudo? I wish I had some time contributing to the effort. Gabor http://szabgab.com/ Maybe we should focus on porting Perl 5 modules on hackathons around the events and blog about the process. Not that I did any serious shot at Perl 6 :-! Regards Racke -- LinuXia Systems = http://www.linuxia.de/ Expert Interchange Consulting and System Administration ICDEVGROUP = http://www.icdevgroup.org/ Interchange Development Team
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Thu, 2011-06-01 at 14:53 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote: I would be very interested to see something that allowed Rakudo to talk to Fortran 95. I am going to use Fortran 95 for my thesis work, and maybe I could write a module to give Rakudo a basic array language. Nothing fancy Is there anything like this for perl5 ? In 2001/2 or so someone asked me to convert their perl implementation of a published algorithm to C. Took two hours to do the prototype from the journal article and the run-time went from 24 hours to 5 minutes. The algorithm was the ruelle-takens algorithm (ca 1979, iirc) to compute the fractal dimension of a series. Application was bioinformatics and the journal was a political science one. Very weird mix. Never had a chance to get back to it but I was thinking that an array module for perl5 would be useful. I probably still have the code stashed somewhere. like MATLAB, NumPy or PDL, but enough to try out algorithms and prototype ideas. As it is, I'll probably use PDL or NumPy for that purpose. -- --gh
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: On Thu, 2011-06-01 at 14:53 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote: I would be very interested to see something that allowed Rakudo to talk to Fortran 95. I am going to use Fortran 95 for my thesis work, and maybe I could write a module to give Rakudo a basic array language. Nothing fancy Is there anything like this for perl5 ? Yes, PDL. That's the Perl Data Language. And NumPy is the same thing for Python. The algorithm was the ruelle-takens algorithm (ca 1979, iirc) to compute the fractal dimension of a series. Application was bioinformatics and the journal was a political science one. Very weird mix. Never had a chance to get back to it but I was thinking that an array module for perl5 would be useful. I probably still have the code stashed somewhere. If the algorithm can be expressed largely as array operations, then PDL should give a speed more in the ballpark of the C version. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net writes: My point is make it a production release so peeps can push it to the powers that be in the corporate world. Valid point. Will http://packages.debian.org/experimental/rakudo be continued? This has been the longest production build in test in the history of mankind. If this was a real world project it would have been dead sometime ago. Don't worry too much. Python 3000 took about 8 years. (Though not sure about betas for testing.) Kind regards, Steffen -- Steffen Schwigon s...@renormalist.net Dresden Perl Mongers http://dresden-pm.org/
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Stefan Hornburg (Racke) ra...@linuxia.de writes: Maybe we should focus on porting Perl 5 modules With the current size of CPAN this is IMHO not the way to go. A Perl5 embedding interface is more promising. Pugs had that in a not perfect but usable state. Not sure about Rakudo. An embedded Perl5 in Rakudo would even legitimate a special handling that does not need to be generic in the usual “all foreign-language vs. all Perl6-compilers” standard, because it's about Perl-on-Perl. Once I could easily access CPAN modules I would immediately start using Perl 6 for the daily routine work. The language has everything I need, I just can't hack all the things I regularly use from CPAN. Kind regards, Steffen -- Steffen Schwigon s...@renormalist.net Dresden Perl Mongers http://dresden-pm.org/
Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the difficulty Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a production release): - What constitues a production release? - What was the first production release of Perl 4? - What was the first production release of Perl 5? - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Pm Larry responded to a post of mine asking about when Perl6 would be finished - the post was about the time that Pugs was still being actively developed. He pointed to the difference between the waterfall model and the strange attractor model for software development, perl6 progress being measured using the strange attractor model. Many of the questions and answers about a 'production release' imply the waterfall model. The concept here is that some one 'in authority' sets criteria which define 'finished'. Once the software / language / project fulfils the criteria - the edge of the waterfall - it is 'finished'. This has the advantage that everyone knows when to break out the champaign and have a party. It has the disadvantage that criteria of 'finished' can rarely be written in advance because to do so requires precognition, or knowledge of the future. Is there any sophisticated piece of software that is 'perfect', has no bugs, is easy to use? Was MS Vista 'production' quality? Perl 5.0 was quickly replaced by Perl 5.004 (I think), which include references. The strange attractor model implies a process that is never ending, in that there will always be deviations from the solution 'orbit' or 'path'. However, there comes a time when for most normal purposes, the solution orbit will be so 'narrow' that the blips will be not be noticed for most situations. In this respect, qualitative statements such as 'when developers accept it' or 'providers such as ActiveState etc' bundle it are recognition of the strange attractor measure of progress of Perl6. Personally, I think that we are in sight of acceptance for Rakudo Star. This is an implementation of a subset of Perl6. I also believe that when Rakudo begins to implement Sets, Macros and deals with the problems posed by GUI, we will see further changes in the Perl6 specification. It is unlikely that such changes will 'break' Rakudo *. A question that would be useful to ask is: When will Rakudo Star be useful for some of your purposes? a) It is already useful; b) When running precompiled Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as running Perl5 versions, on average. c) When running (from human readable text to final result) Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as Perl5 versions, on average. d) When Rakudo * implements a larger subset of Perl6 and/or access well-written C/C++ libraries efficiently, presupposing (c). Another question would be what should be in the test suite of example programs? The example programs are not the test suite, which verifies consistency with the specification. The example programs should be designed - I suggest - to test speed and memory footprint. Ultimately, programmers are interested in solutions that are quick and use least hardware resources (the human resource of writing a simple and understandable program being the strongest part of Perl6, at least I think so).
RE: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Hear! Hear! -Original Message- From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarr...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 7:15 AM To: Richard Hainsworth Cc: perl6-users@perl.org Subject: Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl Although everything you said is technically true, I must point out that without a definitive release, potential users will tend to avoid the software. For people not involved in the process (i.e. 99.995% of Perl users) it is impossible to know when the software is good enough for use. You may talk about strange attractors and orbits, but I haven't the faintest clue how big the orbit of either Perl 6 or Rakudo is. Therefore, I cannot recommend it to other people, and I will hesitate to use it on anything that is very important. Daniel. On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the difficulty Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a production release): - What constitues a production release? - What was the first production release of Perl 4? - What was the first production release of Perl 5? - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Pm Larry responded to a post of mine asking about when Perl6 would be finished - the post was about the time that Pugs was still being actively developed. He pointed to the difference between the waterfall model and the strange attractor model for software development, perl6 progress being measured using the strange attractor model. Many of the questions and answers about a 'production release' imply the waterfall model. The concept here is that some one 'in authority' sets criteria which define 'finished'. Once the software / language / project fulfils the criteria - the edge of the waterfall - it is 'finished'. This has the advantage that everyone knows when to break out the champaign and have a party. It has the disadvantage that criteria of 'finished' can rarely be written in advance because to do so requires precognition, or knowledge of the future. Is there any sophisticated piece of software that is 'perfect', has no bugs, is easy to use? Was MS Vista 'production' quality? Perl 5.0 was quickly replaced by Perl 5.004 (I think), which include references. The strange attractor model implies a process that is never ending, in that there will always be deviations from the solution 'orbit' or 'path'. However, there comes a time when for most normal purposes, the solution orbit will be so 'narrow' that the blips will be not be noticed for most situations. In this respect, qualitative statements such as 'when developers accept it' or 'providers such as ActiveState etc' bundle it are recognition of the strange attractor measure of progress of Perl6. Personally, I think that we are in sight of acceptance for Rakudo Star. This is an implementation of a subset of Perl6. I also believe that when Rakudo begins to implement Sets, Macros and deals with the problems posed by GUI, we will see further changes in the Perl6 specification. It is unlikely that such changes will 'break' Rakudo *. A question that would be useful to ask is: When will Rakudo Star be useful for some of your purposes? a) It is already useful; b) When running precompiled Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as running Perl5 versions, on average. c) When running (from human readable text to final result) Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as Perl5 versions, on average. d) When Rakudo * implements a larger subset of Perl6 and/or access well-written C/C++ libraries efficiently, presupposing (c). Another question would be what should be in the test suite of example programs? The example programs are not the test suite, which verifies consistency with the specification. The example programs should be designed - I suggest - to test speed and memory footprint. Ultimately, programmers are interested in solutions that are quick and use least hardware resources (the human resource of writing a simple and understandable program being the strongest part of Perl6, at least I think so). -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced. -- This message w/attachments (message) is intended solely for the use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain information that is privileged, confidential or proprietary. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, and then please delete and destroy all copies and attachments, and be advised that any review
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
There has been requests and talk of a production release for years now. Fancy titles released have come out monthly and quarterly for some time. At some point you have to say it simply isn't a good product or it is going to production how long are we going to hear excuses of my dog died past week and the production release is delayed for a year. Perl 6 at this point seems like a bad dream at best and there really isn't a need since moose and perl 5 have improved. Sent from my iPhone Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net 303-520-7554 Blogsite: http://thoughtsofaperlprogrammer.typepad.com/blog On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:13 AM, Anderson, Jim jim.ander...@bankofamerica.com wrote: Hear! Hear! -Original Message- From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarr...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 7:15 AM To: Richard Hainsworth Cc: perl6-users@perl.org Subject: Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl Although everything you said is technically true, I must point out that without a definitive release, potential users will tend to avoid the software. For people not involved in the process (i.e. 99.995% of Perl users) it is impossible to know when the software is good enough for use. You may talk about strange attractors and orbits, but I haven't the faintest clue how big the orbit of either Perl 6 or Rakudo is. Therefore, I cannot recommend it to other people, and I will hesitate to use it on anything that is very important. Daniel. On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the difficulty Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a production release): - What constitues a production release? - What was the first production release of Perl 4? - What was the first production release of Perl 5? - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Pm Larry responded to a post of mine asking about when Perl6 would be finished - the post was about the time that Pugs was still being actively developed. He pointed to the difference between the waterfall model and the strange attractor model for software development, perl6 progress being measured using the strange attractor model. Many of the questions and answers about a 'production release' imply the waterfall model. The concept here is that some one 'in authority' sets criteria which define 'finished'. Once the software / language / project fulfils the criteria - the edge of the waterfall - it is 'finished'. This has the advantage that everyone knows when to break out the champaign and have a party. It has the disadvantage that criteria of 'finished' can rarely be written in advance because to do so requires precognition, or knowledge of the future. Is there any sophisticated piece of software that is 'perfect', has no bugs, is easy to use? Was MS Vista 'production' quality? Perl 5.0 was quickly replaced by Perl 5.004 (I think), which include references. The strange attractor model implies a process that is never ending, in that there will always be deviations from the solution 'orbit' or 'path'. However, there comes a time when for most normal purposes, the solution orbit will be so 'narrow' that the blips will be not be noticed for most situations. In this respect, qualitative statements such as 'when developers accept it' or 'providers such as ActiveState etc' bundle it are recognition of the strange attractor measure of progress of Perl6. Personally, I think that we are in sight of acceptance for Rakudo Star. This is an implementation of a subset of Perl6. I also believe that when Rakudo begins to implement Sets, Macros and deals with the problems posed by GUI, we will see further changes in the Perl6 specification. It is unlikely that such changes will 'break' Rakudo *. A question that would be useful to ask is: When will Rakudo Star be useful for some of your purposes? a) It is already useful; b) When running precompiled Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as running Perl5 versions, on average. c) When running (from human readable text to final result) Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example programs is as fast as Perl5 versions, on average. d) When Rakudo * implements a larger subset of Perl6 and/or access well-written C/C++ libraries efficiently, presupposing (c). Another question would be what should be in the test suite of example programs? The example programs are not the test suite, which verifies consistency with the specification. The example programs should be designed - I suggest - to test speed and memory footprint. Ultimately, programmers are interested
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 17:30, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: Rakudo is not listed here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ Fixing that is something I'd like to help with. Note that go was listed *before* it was announced. That tells me that the go authors are, in some small way, more serious about their project succeeding than perl6. So your suggestion to Gabor is to add the question: Do you think that NOT listing Rakudo at shootout.alioth.debian.org means Rakudo is not a serious project? Or did you have some other point? (This is the first time I've seen shootout.alioth.debian.org, I won't claim that it's not a serious shootout just because of that, BTW.) -- Jan
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
My point is make it a production release so peeps can push it to the powers that be in the corporate world. This has been the longest production build in test in the history of mankind. If this was a real world project it would have been dead sometime ago. Sent from my iPhone Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net 303-520-7554 Blogsite: http://thoughtsofaperlprogrammer.typepad.com/blog On Jan 5, 2011, at 9:31 AM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: Without the development phenomenon of Perl6, it's difficult to see how Moose and other improvements in perl 5 would have occurred. Despite the frustrations in following the growth of Pugs, then Rakudo, it's been fun, worthwhile and inspiring. A bit like life really. Do you really want it to end? But until it ends, how can you tell what sort of person you are, or what your achievements have been? I love Perl6. Rukudo is great - already. On 01/05/11 17:21, Wendell Hatcher wrote: There has been requests and talk of a production release for years now. Fancy titles released have come out monthly and quarterly for some time. At some point you have to say it simply isn't a good product or it is going to production how long are we going to hear excuses of my dog died past week and the production release is delayed for a year. Perl 6 at this point seems like a bad dream at best and there really isn't a need since moose and perl 5 have improved. Sent from my iPhone Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net 303-520-7554 Blogsite: http://thoughtsofaperlprogrammer.typepad.com/blog On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:13 AM, Anderson, Jimjim.ander...@bankofamerica.com wrote: Hear! Hear! -Original Message- From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarr...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 7:15 AM To: Richard Hainsworth Cc: perl6-users@perl.org Subject: Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl Although everything you said is technically true, I must point out that without a definitive release, potential users will tend to avoid the software. For people not involved in the process (i.e. 99.995% of Perl users) it is impossible to know when the software is good enough snip
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On 01/05/11 19:48, Daniel Carrera wrote: On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:05 PM, Richard Hainsworthrich...@rusrating.ru wrote: It is blindingly obvious that the majority of language users, ..., will only start to use a language when it is recommended by 'those in authority'... I think the issue of a version number is irrelevant 1) You have more or less contradicted yourself. If we agree that Larry Wall is an authority, for example, it is reasonable to wait until he says that the Perl 6 spec is ready, and many will also wait until Rakudo claims to mostly comply with the Perl 6 spec. From what Larry has already said, I dont think he ever will say the Perl 6 spec is ready. The spec and the language are evolving together. That is what the waterfall and attractor stuff was all about. When I said 'in authority', I meant those opinion-makers (from bloggers to journalists to heads of major software developers) who start saying 'xxx is a really cool language'. 2) Version number may not be relevant to you, but it is relevant to others. Therefore, it is relevant to the adoption of Perl 6. And here it seems to me that you begin to prove the point I am trying to make: version numbers are irrelevant as carriers of information about usefulness, stability, or even maturity of product. , given the vested interest of the developer to assign a number that will attract users, That has not been my experience with FOSS projects. Rather, I think developers shy away from ever saying 1.0. For example, the JED editor has been around for a long time, but its version number is 0.99-19. How can 0.99-19 mean anything? Does it mean under 1.0? If so, does this meant that the developers of JED consider it to be unusable or 'not for production purposes'? My entire point is that the version number, in of itself, has no more meaning than what the developers want it to mean. But acceptance is not determined by the developers. The Enlightenment window manager too 10 years before they were comfortable saying 1.0. This fear of 1.0 was even the subject of a paragraph in Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar. to such an extent that there is rule of thumb never to use the first release, but to wait until the version 'has matured'. I've heard this in the Windows world, Though I have been using Linux exclusively for about 5 years now, the Windows world remains an order of magnitude larger. So again, if the point is true in the Windows world, it seems I would win the argument. but I think the FOSS world version numbers tend to be lower. For example, I remember that Netscape 5.0 was equivalent to Mozilla 1.0. Wasnt that due to organisational and ownership changes relating to the development of Netscape? Even if the developers of Rakudo release a V1.0, would that in itself lead to the acceptance of Perl6. I doubt it. Necessary but not sufficient condition? Not even necessary. Why not v0.99-? A great deal that is needed to demonstrate the stability and strength of Perl6 for 'production' purposes has been included in the design from the very beginning, namely, a MASSIVE test suite. How many people, not involved in Perl 6, know that? See the point? I bet that you don't follow the development process of every single software package you use. For any given software package, 99.99% of users do not follow the developers list of look through the test suite. You are again confirming a point I have tried to make. Most people do not themselves try out new languages or indeed anything new until they have read a recommendation from someone they trust. If I want a new camera, I search the internet for reviews - I cant test each one. But once I do settle on a choice, I then want the proof. Just because a reviewer says its good, how do I know he / she isnt paid by the company? The proof that software is stable and robust comes from testing. And testing has been the foundation of the development of Perl6. When - eventually - critics compare Perl6 to some other language and discuss the robustness of the compiler, they will look at the size of the test suites. Richard Daniel.
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, 2011-05-01 at 10:24 -0700, Wendell Hatcher wrote: I have to agree I don't think this is a serious project. In-fact at this point it seems like a bunch of friends working on a hobby in their basement. I'm not sure I said anything to agree with. You seem to misinterpret my intention. [snip] Do you think that NOT listing Rakudo at shootout.alioth.debian.org means Rakudo is not a serious project? Or did you have some other point? Marketing. What I meant was that a serious project pays attention to marketing. The perl6 marketing effort is limited by resources more than go is. [snip] The benchmarking program can be downloaded (which I've done) and comes bundled with 2 or 3 python programs, one of which requires python 2.5 and I'm still on python 2.4 (don't ask). However I've figured out how to see the source for example programs, so I'll manually download all the perl5 and C ones and try to get the benchmarker going for those. Here's what I will attempt to reproduce: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=alllang=perllang2=gcc I will start by downloading each program in C and perl (there seem to be several C versions -- and sometimes several perl versions available) and just running them appropriately. It'll take me a little while ... I'm fairly busy. I'll report _any_ progress back to the list ... if you don't hear from me by February 1st feel free to nag me. By 'progress', I mean something on github. -- --gh
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
'serious project' ??? For some 'serious' people, Perl6 is a 'serious project'. Concepts of 'serious' differ amongst reasonable people. Not a problem if your 'serious' aint my 'serious'. As an aside, it took 358 years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles - who proved it - shut himself away for the five years he spent creating the last part of the proof sequence. A number of historical figures have looked at the problem. That to my mind is a 'serious project' and serious people, and Wiles did indeed work on it in a 'basement' as a 'hobby'. It was an obsession and he was afraid of telling people what he was working on. But now we consider him a hero. Rakudo and Perl6 is being developed in the way it is for good and practical reasons. Richard On 01/05/11 20:24, Wendell Hatcher wrote: I have to agree I don't think this is a serious project. In-fact at this point it seems like a bunch of friends working on a hobby in their basement. Sent from my iPhone Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net 303-520-7554 Blogsite: http://thoughtsofaperlprogrammer.typepad.com/blog On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:15 AM, Guy Hulbertgwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: On Wed, 2011-05-01 at 18:02 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 17:30, Guy Hulbertgwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: Rakudo is not listed here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ Fixing that is something I'd like to help with. Note that go was listed *before* it was announced. That tells me that the go authors are, in some small way, more serious about their project succeeding than perl6. So your suggestion to Gabor is to add the question: No. The subject changed ... Do you think that NOT listing Rakudo at shootout.alioth.debian.org means Rakudo is not a serious project? Or did you have some other point? Marketing. (This is the first time I've seen shootout.alioth.debian.org, I won't claim that it's not a serious shootout just because of that, BTW.) When go was announced a link to 'shootout' was in the announcement. I think I might have seen if before that but, if so, i'd forgotten so it was new to me at the time. What got me interested in perl6 was the april fools announcement about parrot ostensibly by Larry and Guido. Something like 10 years ago. I don't learn new programming languages unless I have something to do with it. I've been looking at what it would take to implement perl6/rakudo versions of the programs on 'shootout', and I think I can do it so I will try to get one or two of them running properly in the benchmarker. The benchmarking program can be downloaded (which I've done) and comes bundled with 2 or 3 python programs, one of which requires python 2.5 and I'm still on python 2.4 (don't ask). However I've figured out how to see the source for example programs, so I'll manually download all the perl5 and C ones and try to get the benchmarker going for those. It'll take me a little while ... -- --gh
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Guy, Your idea is actually exactly what I was suggesting when I said 'example programs'. I think there are/were perl6 versions for the shootout problems. I am not sure what happened to them. Getting benchmarking will be interesting. Regards, Richard On 01/05/11 20:15, Guy Hulbert wrote: On Wed, 2011-05-01 at 18:02 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 17:30, Guy Hulbertgwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: Rakudo is not listed here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ Fixing that is something I'd like to help with. Note that go was listed *before* it was announced. That tells me that the go authors are, in some small way, more serious about their project succeeding than perl6. So your suggestion to Gabor is to add the question: No. The subject changed ... Do you think that NOT listing Rakudo at shootout.alioth.debian.org means Rakudo is not a serious project? Or did you have some other point? Marketing. (This is the first time I've seen shootout.alioth.debian.org, I won't claim that it's not a serious shootout just because of that, BTW.) When go was announced a link to 'shootout' was in the announcement. I think I might have seen if before that but, if so, i'd forgotten so it was new to me at the time. What got me interested in perl6 was the april fools announcement about parrot ostensibly by Larry and Guido. Something like 10 years ago. I don't learn new programming languages unless I have something to do with it. I've been looking at what it would take to implement perl6/rakudo versions of the programs on 'shootout', and I think I can do it so I will try to get one or two of them running properly in the benchmarker. The benchmarking program can be downloaded (which I've done) and comes bundled with 2 or 3 python programs, one of which requires python 2.5 and I'm still on python 2.4 (don't ask). However I've figured out how to see the source for example programs, so I'll manually download all the perl5 and C ones and try to get the benchmarker going for those. It'll take me a little while ...
Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, 2011-05-01 at 20:51 +0300, Richard Hainsworth wrote: 'serious project' ??? For some 'serious' people, Perl6 is a 'serious project'. Concepts of 'serious' differ amongst reasonable people. Not a problem if your 'serious' aint my 'serious'. For programming languages, there are rankings by number of developers. A Historical Example DateNumber 19791 198016 198138 198285 1983??+2 1984??+50 1985500 19862,000 19874,000 198815,000 198950,000 1990150,000 1991400,000 Taken from the language author's Design and Evolution book. Chapter 7. My wife was sent on a course to learn this language in the early 1990s. So you have about 10 years to get started. -- --gh
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: I think it largely depends on who do you ask and I believe there will be a huge gap between private people and company people. Or between people who are involved in open source development and in-house developers. I don't see the open source vs in-house point you are trying to make, but I still agree with the general point that production partly depends who you ask and what they need it for. For example, I expect that most companies would tolerate more bugs in a program for internal use than in a program intended for paying customers. That said, I tried to give a vague notion in my earlier post. Production means that the developers have given me some sort of verbal assurance that the product is reasonably stable and can be relied on to reasonably work as documented. Some kind of an official blessing is needed by most of us. This can be Larry for Perl or Patrick for Rakudo or having it supplied by our vendor (e.g. Ubuntu, Red Hat or ActiveState). Yeah, something like that. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler I think I'll include both answers. If we learn that people desperately need a 1.0 numbering then the Rakudo developers can make up their mind to either change the numbering scheme or invest more in education of the users. Maybe pointing out that after releasing 2011.01 you can't release 1.0. :) Not much chance of educating users. Release numbers have more or less established standard meanings. It is impossible or impractical for someone to be educated about the idiosyncratic numbering scheme of every product they use. That's why there are standards, even if they are informal. The 1.0 = ready standard is well established in the FOSS world (it even gets a paragraph in ESR's The Cathedral and The Bazaar). People are not wrong to expect that 1.0 is the sign that the product is ready and that 0.x means that it's still in a state of flux. FOSS numbering standards go further than that. It is extremely common that products be numbered X.Y.Z where Y even indicates stable version and Y odd indicates development version. Perl 5 switched to this numbering scheme years ago precisely because people were familiar with it and understood it. ps. In Padre I try to stick to the increase by 0.01 and not jump to 1.00. It is surprising how many people tell us I'll use Padre once 1.0 is released. I can't even imagine how many people think the same but don't tell us. Look at it from my point of view: I don't have time or energy to join the Padre development list and track its progress in order to decide for myself if it is ready for use. I certainly don't have the time or energy or inclination to do that for every single software product I use. I will make exceptions for software that has a very long history. I have no doubt that Emacs and Vi are stable, so I don't care what their numbering scheme is. But for stuff that is new enough to make me wonder, I will tend to wait for 1.0. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 12:53:17PM +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote: On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Moritz Lenz mor...@faui2k3.org wrote: Given the current version number scheme (year.month), it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see a Rakudo 1.0. So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler People might be expecting that when Rakudo is ready it would have a 1.0 release. I sure did. Using year + month is nice in a way, but it means that you don't immediately know if the release is production vs devel, or whether it's a major vs minor release. Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the difficulty Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a production release): - What constitues a production release? - What was the first production release of Perl 4? - What was the first production release of Perl 5? - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Pm
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 10:27 -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote: - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Linus declared what his goals for 1.0 were and started a 0.9x series. I think the transition was something like 0.12 - 0.95 but when I started using linux it was about 0.99c or so. I started in December and the 1.0 was some time the following summer. I think the 0.95 (or whatever) was about August/September. Debian's first public release was something like 0.94rc6 but their version numbers now look like: 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 5.1 ... I think freezing a subset of what you eventually want to have and then getting as close as you can on a fairly tight schedule is the best way to get buy-in from users. Debian has a pretty good way to do this. Except for release-critical bugs, I think they eventually just push all the rest into the next release aobut a week before they publish the final product. I know that this description is imprecise but you can see it what they really do in their bug graphs. -- --gh
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 18:33, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 18:25 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: At least have the decency to change the e-mail subject when the discussion's subject has changed! IMO, the subject changed at the second post. I was just responding to P Michaud who is the current principal developer of the s/w being discussed. You guys stopped discussing the questionnaire a LONG time before PM answered. There has hardly been a handful of helpful posts. Getting back on topic, I, for one, would like to know how many people have heard about Perl 6, and to what extent. I would like to know whether they use it or not, and to what extent (already covered in some of the suggestions), and I would like to know whether people like what they see or not, and to which extent. -- Jan
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 06:25:18PM +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 18:05, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 10:27 -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote: - What was the first production release of Linux? - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? Linus declared what his goals for 1.0 were and started a 0.9x series. and so on. While this meta discussion is all very nice, I don't really see what it has to do with the questionnaire. Gabor didn't ask us to discuss the answers to the questions, he asked us to come up with more questions that we would like to see answered. In order to put together a worthwhile survey, I think some meta-discussions about the questons/answers we're likely to encounter are important. I also think the existence of a survey itself is likely to re-open a variety of otherwise dormant Perl 6 discussions and threads (as it already has), so we should be cognizant of that potential impact. Still, if others feel that the production release meta-discussion is too far off-topic for consideration in the questionnaire, I'll let it drop here and perhaps reintroduce it under another thread. Pm
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 18:45 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: You guys stopped discussing the questionnaire a LONG time before PM answered. There has hardly been a handful of helpful posts. That's what I said and that was my first post. Getting back on topic, I, for one, would like to know how many people have heard about Perl 6, and to what extent. I would like to know whether they use it or not, and to what extent (already covered in some of the suggestions), and I would like to know whether people like what they see or not, and to which extent. Many people seem to be proposing questions which ask people's opinions of things which are factual and can be answered readily by reading the documentation. For example, your question can be partly answered by looking at the rakudo download page. There were about 3000 downloads of the July release (I was one) and since then there have been less than 1000 (not me) per month. Personally, I have decided to finally make a commitment to writing a perl6 app. This is not entirely due to the state of rakudo. The biggest influence on my decision was the posting of the example of a class which implements a rolled dice. I've been interested in parrot and perl6 ever since they were announced but I don't have a lot of time or expertise to contribute. So I subscribed to this mailing list when I was finally convinced that perl6 was going to really happen. -- --gh
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 19:02, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: Many people seem to be proposing questions which ask people's opinions of things which are factual and can be answered readily by reading the documentation. For example, your question can be partly answered by looking at the rakudo download page. There were about 3000 downloads of the July release (I was one) and since then there have been less than 1000 (not me) per month. That tells us that there is a lower download rate, to be sure, and that might indicate a lower rate uptake. It does not, however, answer any of the question_s_ I wanted asked, and which others have wanted asked, not even partially. There is a difference between simplified statistical aggregates and getting responses from human beings, which are then analyzed. The way in which you ask a question can, of course, also introduce a bias in how the response appears. If you ask: Do you think Perl 6 will ever be production ready? you may have introduced a negative bias in the question. But with careful phrasing - something I've been sloppy with in this thread, I'm sorry to say - then you can (probably) get the information you want. -- Jan
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 20:10 +0100, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote: It does not, however, answer any of the question_s_ I wanted asked, and which others have wanted asked, not even partially. I haven't seen any such requests from you on this thread. Is this discussion happening elsewhere as well ? [snip] But with careful phrasing - something I've been sloppy with in this thread, I'm sorry to say - then you can (probably) get the information you want. It seems to me the information you want is up to Gabor, who started this thread. I'm looking back at his posts: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2010/12/msg1366.html == I am preparing a survey of the Perl Ecosystem which will take the TPF survey and extend it. == I'm not sure what 'TPF survey' is. Gabor has a URL: http://perl-ecosystem.org/ in his original post, which was omitted from his follow-ups. There are 3 more ideas here: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2010/12/msg1369.html The question of an official release arose here: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2011/01/msg1388.html Apart from the 'TPF survey'. The main thrust seems to be: a) How to get people to use perl6. b) How to get people to help develop it. Seems to be a chicken and egg problem. I am about to start on (a) and if I get anywhere, I will try to work on (b). So (a) seems to be more important. I'm going to shut-up and look at the 'ecosystem' link now and perhaps see if I can figure out what 'TPF survey' means. BTW, one other thing that interested me is that padre supports perl6 and can be got running on windows fairly easily now. My IDE is 'emacs' but that does not help much with perl on windows ... so padre might be a boost to perl6 adoption, if we believe that an important target for perl6 is perl5 developers. Yes, I know that Gabor is responsible for padre so tia. -- --gh
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: I'm not sure what 'TPF survey' is. http://survey.perlfoundation.org/ Gabor
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Patrick R. Michaud pmich...@pobox.com wrote: Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the difficulty Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a production release): - What constitues a production release? The developers judge that the software is reasonably feature complete, and more importantly, it is robust enough to use in a production environment such as a school or company website, where customers will experience it. It does not mean that it is perfect, or fast. But the programmer should have a reasonable expectation that it will work correctly (aka as documented). - What was the first production release of Perl 4? I never saw Perl 4, but I suspect 4.0. - What was the first production release of Perl 5? I suspect 5.0. - What was the first production release of Linux? I suspect 1.0 - At what point was each of the above declared a production release; was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards? IMO, concurrent. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 6:05 PM, Guy Hulbert gwhulb...@eol.ca wrote: I think freezing a subset of what you eventually want to have and then getting as close as you can on a fairly tight schedule is the best way to get buy-in from users. That is generally what I expect to see in a production release, yes. I don't think it's a rule, but I expect to see a feature freeze, and a period where you just look for bugs for the existing feature set, and then comes the production release. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sun, 2011-02-01 at 22:30 +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote: Thanks. Found that already. It does not list the questions asked and I can't figure out how to download the PDF report or to clone the repository it's in on github. Jan Involdstadt suggested I look at TPF website and following the link to the 2009 survey, I figured out how to get the git url (they've changed the interface since I was last there). git clone git://github.com/singingfish/Data-PerlSurvey-2010.git and less Data-PerlSurvey-2010/data/all_data.csv perldoc Data-PerlSurvey-2010/lib/Data/PerlSurvey/2010.pm gives you most of what you need. -- --gh
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Moritz Lenz mor...@faui2k3.org wrote: On 01/01/2011 10:15 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote: So for example: I'll start learning Perl 6 (select one or more that fits your opinion) *) when Larry Wall declares that Perl 6.0 is ready *) after Rakudo 1.0 is released Given the current version number scheme (year.month), it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see a Rakudo 1.0. So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler I think I'll include both answers. If we learn that people desperately need a 1.0 numbering then the Rakudo developers can make up their mind to either change the numbering scheme or invest more in education of the users. Maybe pointing out that after releasing 2011.01 you can't release 1.0. :) Gabor ps. In Padre I try to stick to the increase by 0.01 and not jump to 1.00. It is surprising how many people tell us I'll use Padre once 1.0 is released. I can't even imagine how many people think the same but don't tell us.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Richard Hainsworth wrote: Moreover, a survey should be testing perceptions, even if the perceptions contradict what some feel are facts. It sometimes pays to be agnostic about what can be counted as a fact to learn how other people think. Eg., in the real world there are those who perceive as fact the timeline of the history of life as set out in the Old Testament of the Bible, and there are those that look to other mechanisms for testing timeline theories, such as a the geological record. Dont want to start a religious war, just wanting to indicate that a survey can be useful if worded in a value-free manner. There are also those who perceive as fact that the biblical and geological timelines are not mutually exclusive and are both plausible. -- Darren Duncan
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: On 01/01/11 03:41, Daniel Carrera wrote: On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Chas. Owenschas.ow...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 21:39, Xue, Brianbrian@amd.com wrote: I want to adding one more answer about what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. There hasn't an official release of PERL6.0, just Rakudo. I'm afraid of Rakudo is cancelled, I don't want to make my product based on an uncertainty matter. snip This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Perl 6 is. As far as I know there will never be a release of Perl 6.0 (it definitely won't be PERL6.0). Perl 6 is a specification and a set of tests. Any program that can pass the test suite and conforms to the specification IS a Perl 6. Right now the program that passes the most tests and conforms most closely to the specification is Rakudo. But Xue still has a valid point that even the Perl 6 spec doesn't exist yet. Moreover, a survey should be testing perceptions, even if the perceptions contradict what some feel are facts. It sometimes pays to be agnostic about what can be counted as a fact to learn how other people think. [...] just wanting to indicate that a survey can be useful if worded in a value-free manner. It would be nice to figure out what is the percentage of people who don't yet look at Perl 6 because there was not official Perl 6.0 release or in more general what are the blocking issues for them. I just would like to make sure that by asking the question we don't strengthen the belief that there ever will be an official Perl 6.0 release. Of course that might be part of *my* misunderstanding that I think there won't be such thing. I don't have trouble if the questions and the possible answers already provide some form of education pointing people to the possible real answers. So for example: I'll start learning Perl 6 (select one or more that fits your opinion) *) when Larry Wall declares that Perl 6.0 is ready *) after Rakudo 1.0 is released *) when the default running perl -v in my Linux distribution will say it is version 6.0 or later *) After the Learning Perl 6th edition will be published *) After DBI and DBD::Mysql is ported *) never *) I have already started to learn Other: What do you think? regards Gabor
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: It would be nice to figure out what is the percentage of people who don't yet look at Perl 6 because there was not official Perl 6.0 release or in more general what are the blocking issues for them. I just would like to make sure that by asking the question we don't strengthen the belief that there ever will be an official Perl 6.0 release. ... So for example: I'll start learning Perl 6 (select one or more that fits your opinion) *) when Larry Wall declares that Perl 6.0 is ready *) after Rakudo 1.0 is released *) when the default running perl -v in my Linux distribution will say it is version 6.0 or later *) After the Learning Perl 6th edition will be published *) After DBI and DBD::Mysql is ported *) never *) I have already started to learn Other: What do you think? I think that's pretty good. Though personally, I can imagine the first two not being mutually exclusive. That is, if Rakudo 1.0 is released but Larry Wall hasn't said that Perl 6.0 is ready, I'd scratch my head and wonder. In turn, if Perl 6.0 is ready and Rakudo hasn't released a 1.0 I might figure that they still need more time. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On 01/01/2011 10:15 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote: It would be nice to figure out what is the percentage of people who don't yet look at Perl 6 because there was not official Perl 6.0 release or in more general what are the blocking issues for them. I just would like to make sure that by asking the question we don't strengthen the belief that there ever will be an official Perl 6.0 release. Of course that might be part of *my* misunderstanding that I think there won't be such thing. I don't have trouble if the questions and the possible answers already provide some form of education pointing people to the possible real answers. So for example: I'll start learning Perl 6 (select one or more that fits your opinion) *) when Larry Wall declares that Perl 6.0 is ready *) after Rakudo 1.0 is released Given the current version number scheme (year.month), it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see a Rakudo 1.0. So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler *) when the default running perl -v in my Linux distribution will say it is version 6.0 or later *) After the Learning Perl 6th edition will be published *) After DBI and DBD::Mysql is ported *) never *) I have already started to learn Other: What do you think? Maybe add *) when it's about as fast as perl5 I think it's an interesting question. Cheers, Moritz
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Moritz Lenz mor...@faui2k3.org wrote: Given the current version number scheme (year.month), it's highly unlikely that we'll ever see a Rakudo 1.0. So I'd change that to after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler People might be expecting that when Rakudo is ready it would have a 1.0 release. I sure did. Using year + month is nice in a way, but it means that you don't immediately know if the release is production vs devel, or whether it's a major vs minor release. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 23:02, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: We will have questions about usage of Perl 5 and we think there should be also questions about Perl 6. Should Perl 6 be called something else? * No * Yes, not sure what * Yes, [] Maybe a question on perceived benefits for an alternative name. (It's quite apparent this is a very different language at the very least syntactically I'm inclined to join others I've read in saying Yes) Paul
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 7:17 PM, Paul Makepeace pa...@paulm.com wrote: On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 23:02, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: We will have questions about usage of Perl 5 and we think there should be also questions about Perl 6. Should Perl 6 be called something else? * No * Yes, not sure what * Yes, [] Maybe a question on perceived benefits for an alternative name. (It's quite apparent this is a very different language at the very least syntactically I'm inclined to join others I've read in saying Yes) That would suggest that Larry Wall is soliciting ideas for a name change, which is not the case. I would not that it is not unheard of for a language to change significantly but keep the name. If you look Fortran 2008 (just to pick an example I'm familiar with) it looks *nothing* like FORTRAN II. I'm no expert, but I believe KR's original C language was noticeably different from C99. For amusement, below I include the same program in FORTRAN II and Fortran 90. The program uses Heron's formula for finding the area of a triangle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron's_formula): 1) FORTRAN II (note that all the indentations are significant!!!) C READ FROM CARD READER UNIT 5 READ INPUT TAPE 5, 501, IA, IB, IC 501 FORMAT (3I5) C COMPUTE AREA 799 S = FLOATF (IA + IB + IC) / 2.0 AREA = SQRT( S * (S - FLOATF(IA)) * (S - FLOATF(IB)) * + (S - FLOATF(IC))) C OUTPUT TO LINE PRINTER UNIT 6 WRITE OUTPUT TAPE 6, 601, IA, IB, IC, AREA 601 FORMAT (4H A= ,I5,5H B= ,I5,5H C= ,I5,8H AREA= ,F10.2, +13H SQUARE UNITS) STOP END 2) Fortran 90: program heron integer :: a,b,c real :: s, area ! Read from stdin. read (*,*) a,b,c ! Compute the area. s = ( a + b + c)/2 area = sqrt( s * (s-a) * (s-b) * (s-c) ) write (*,*) a,b,c,area end program -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
In-Reply-To: Message from Daniel Carrera dcarr...@gmail.com of Fri, 31 Dec 2010 20:20:33 +0100. For amusement, below I include the same program in FORTRAN II and Fortran 90. That was delightful -- thanks! --tom
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Chas. Owens chas.ow...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 21:39, Xue, Brian brian@amd.com wrote: I want to adding one more answer about what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. There hasn't an official release of PERL6.0, just Rakudo. I'm afraid of Rakudo is cancelled, I don't want to make my product based on an uncertainty matter. snip This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Perl 6 is. As far as I know there will never be a release of Perl 6.0 (it definitely won't be PERL6.0). Perl 6 is a specification and a set of tests. Any program that can pass the test suite and conforms to the specification IS a Perl 6. Right now the program that passes the most tests and conforms most closely to the specification is Rakudo. But Xue still has a valid point that even the Perl 6 spec doesn't exist yet. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On 01/01/11 03:41, Daniel Carrera wrote: On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:26 AM, Chas. Owenschas.ow...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 21:39, Xue, Brianbrian@amd.com wrote: I want to adding one more answer about what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. There hasn't an official release of PERL6.0, just Rakudo. I'm afraid of Rakudo is cancelled, I don't want to make my product based on an uncertainty matter. snip This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what Perl 6 is. As far as I know there will never be a release of Perl 6.0 (it definitely won't be PERL6.0). Perl 6 is a specification and a set of tests. Any program that can pass the test suite and conforms to the specification IS a Perl 6. Right now the program that passes the most tests and conforms most closely to the specification is Rakudo. But Xue still has a valid point that even the Perl 6 spec doesn't exist yet. Moreover, a survey should be testing perceptions, even if the perceptions contradict what some feel are facts. It sometimes pays to be agnostic about what can be counted as a fact to learn how other people think. Eg., in the real world there are those who perceive as fact the timeline of the history of life as set out in the Old Testament of the Bible, and there are those that look to other mechanisms for testing timeline theories, such as a the geological record. Dont want to start a religious war, just wanting to indicate that a survey can be useful if worded in a value-free manner.
RE: Questions for Survey about Perl
I want to adding one more answer about what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. There hasn't an official release of PERL6.0, just Rakudo. I'm afraid of Rakudo is cancelled, I don't want to make my product based on an uncertainty matter. Brian -Original Message- From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarr...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2010 8:25 PM To: Gabor Szabo Cc: Richard Hainsworth; perl6-users@perl.org Subject: Re: Questions for Survey about Perl On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: So in relation to what Katherine wrote earlier we should have a question trying to figure out what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. That's an excellent question. Possible answers: * I'm waiting for a specific feature to be implemented in Rakudo. * Rakudo is too slow. * I didn't realize Rakudo was ready for use. * Other [ fill in the blank ] Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Gabor, there is a big gap between 'i wrote snippets' to 'i wrote modules'. How about 'i have written programs to solve real problems' ? How about a question on involvement in the perl6 development process, so as to see how many people are following the process passively, and how many are contributing in some way. How about a question concerning respondents perceptions of perl6 as a language they would like to use, or something comparing the language with othr languages. If these are in line with the aim of the survey and you want, I could write the questions and provide possible graded answers. Richard On 12/29/2010 10:02 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote: Hi, I am preparing a survey of the Perl Ecosystem which will take the TPF survey and extend it. We will have questions about usage of Perl 5 and we think there should be also questions about Perl 6. So far I came up with only one: How much Perl 6 do you know ? answers: - none - I read some of the docs and wrote small snippets of code - I wrote module(s) - I use it in production environment I'd be happy to get your input on how else would you put this question or what possible other answers you would allow. If you have other ideas what you would like to ask the greater Perl Ecosystem please let me know that too. regards Gabor Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/ Perl Ecosystem Group http://perl-ecosystem.org/
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: Gabor, there is a big gap between 'i wrote snippets' to 'i wrote modules'. How about 'i have written programs to solve real problems' ? How about a question on involvement in the perl6 development process, so as to see how many people are following the process passively, and how many are contributing in some way. How about a question concerning respondents perceptions of perl6 as a language they would like to use, or something comparing the language with othr languages. If these are in line with the aim of the survey and you want, I could write the questions and provide possible graded answers. These sound like good ideas. We are interested both in usage and in the involvement of people in the development of Perl 5/6, CPAN and in the obstacles people see. So in relation to what Katherine wrote earlier we should have a question trying to figure out what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. Also I'd like to be able to figure out what could make more people contribute to the development. On any levels so that would include implementing part of Rakudo or writing tests or docs or any other area of involvement. The answers can be either single choice or multiple choice with a limit to the number of choices and we can always provide a comment field. Your help in preparing the questions is appreciated! regards Gabor
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Richard Hainsworth rich...@rusrating.ru wrote: Gabor, there is a big gap between 'i wrote snippets' to 'i wrote modules'. How about 'i have written programs to solve real problems' ? I agree. Although I don't use Perl 6 in production yet, for Perl 5 I can say that I've never written a module, but I've used it a lot in production. In fact... I might even suggest dropping the modules one, because you might have used Perl 6 in production without ever writing a module (as I have done for Perl 5). Unless you include toy modules that are better categorized as code snippets for learning the language, in which case they rank lower than used Perl to solve real problems. So I vote for removing the modules one. I have another question: If you use Perl 6 for your research (e.g. Masters thesis, PhD thesis, or university research), does that count as production environment or just real problems? Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: So in relation to what Katherine wrote earlier we should have a question trying to figure out what are people waiting for before they start using Perl 6. That's an excellent question. Possible answers: * I'm waiting for a specific feature to be implemented in Rakudo. * Rakudo is too slow. * I didn't realize Rakudo was ready for use. * Other [ fill in the blank ] Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email, but a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Hi, On 12/29/2010 08:02 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote: I'd be happy to get your input on how else would you put this question or what possible other answers you would allow. Here are some very rough ideas: How much do you know about Perl 6? * nothing except the name * some design ideas or history * enough for very simple programs * solid knowledge How do you keep informed about Perl 6 (multiple answers)? * I don't * general tech news sites (slashdot, reddit, lwn, ...) * mailing lists * Perl 6 specific blogs or blog aggregators * other (please comment) What do you think about the relation between 5 and 6 * I don't * Perl 6 hurts Perl 5 * Perl 5 benefits from Perl 5 * The two are mostly independent Cheers, Moritz
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 09:03, Moritz Lenz mor...@faui2k3.org wrote: snip What do you think about the relation between 5 and 6 * I don't * Perl 6 hurts Perl 5 * Perl 5 benefits from Perl 5 * The two are mostly independent snip As for the third option, I think Perl 5 is hurt by Perl 5, but benefits from Perl 6. -- Chas. Owens wonkden.net The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.
Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Why use Perl 6 at this time what are the benefits besides what it has done (Moose-declare) object oriented programming for Perl 5? Sent from my iPhone Wendell Hatcher wendell_hatc...@comcast.net 303-520-7554 Blogsite: http://thoughtsofaperlprogrammer.typepad.com/blog On Dec 29, 2010, at 12:02 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, I am preparing a survey of the Perl Ecosystem which will take the TPF survey and extend it. We will have questions about usage of Perl 5 and we think there should be also questions about Perl 6. So far I came up with only one: How much Perl 6 do you know ? answers: - none - I read some of the docs and wrote small snippets of code - I wrote module(s) - I use it in production environment I'd be happy to get your input on how else would you put this question or what possible other answers you would allow. If you have other ideas what you would like to ask the greater Perl Ecosystem please let me know that too. regards Gabor Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/ Perl Ecosystem Group http://perl-ecosystem.org/
