Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-15 Thread Kirrily Skud Robert

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 07:13:30PM -0500, Adam Turoff wrote:
 On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 05:03:12PM +, Simon Cozens wrote:
  There's obvious FUD out there and we don't seem to be giving the impression of
  getting much done, or doing anything to counter it. 
 
 Let's be fair.  We're not getting much done, and that's a *GOOD* thing.
 
 Language design is a very tough nut to crack, and we decided (as
 a group) that we don't want a language designed by committee, we
 want a languaged designed by Larry.  The best we can do (frustrating
 as it may be) is to let him think deeply.

Wasn't he meant to be keeping us up to date with snippets of what he's
doing/thinking about?  I recall Nat posting a couple of months ago that
he'd talked to Larry and Larry had said he'd do this.

K.




Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-14 Thread Ask Bjoern Hansen

On Sun, 11 Feb 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:

 Ask, could we have the PDDs placed up on dev.perl.org in the
 same way as the RFCs, please?

I made a simple list of what we have so far at
http://dev.perl.org/ppd/

 - ask

-- 
ask bjoern hansen - http://ask.netcetera.dk/





Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-11 Thread Simon Cozens

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 06:57:03AM +, Simon Cozens wrote:
 Likewise. More so since I didn't even receive it. 

I retract that; I've been having mail problems all weekend and it's
since arrived.

 Brian, you're not in my good books today, this month or this year.
 Please sort it out. Now.

I retract that, too, it was completely uncalled for.

-- 
There seems no plan because it is all plan.
-- C.S. Lewis



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-11 Thread Simon Cozens

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 11:28:45AM -0500, brian d foy wrote:
 okay.  i quit.

Well, hm. I'd rather we actually made something positive out of this.

There's obvious FUD out there and we don't seem to be giving the impression of
getting much done, or doing anything to counter it. Part of the problem is
that we don't currently have anything that we can point to and call progress.
That's a problem in itself, because if people don't see progress they lose
interest and go away.

In order to do something about this, I suggest that we should:

 i) maintain a weekly summary of what's going on on the mailing lists.
I'm happy to do this when I do the p5p summary; it could be hosted on
www.perl.com or www.perl.org, I suppose. I'll post the summaries to
perl6-meta and people can do what they will with them.

ii) maintain a white paper style document on dev.perl.org detailing what 
we've decided, what we've considered, our rationales and so on. 
Roughly, a distilled summary of *all* of the mailing list traffic, ever.
I can make a start on that tomorrow. That way people have something to
look at and see where we're at.

Other suggestions as to how to tell the world what we're doing appreciated.

-- 
Sauvin Remember: amateurs built the Ark; _professionals_ built the
Titantic.



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-11 Thread Simon Cozens

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 05:03:12PM +, Simon Cozens wrote:
 In order to do something about this, I suggest that we should:
  i) ...
 ii) ...

I forgot iii)...

Ask, could we have the PDDs placed up on dev.perl.org in the same way as the
RFCs, please?

So far we have
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg02116.html   
and
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg02305.html   

There's also the suggestion for the PDD format
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg00631.html

Thanks a load!

-- 
Halfjack Ah the joys of festival + Gutenburg project.  I can now have
Moby Dick read to me by Stephen Hawking.



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-10 Thread Eric S. Raymond

brian d foy [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
 On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:
 
  Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't
  you supposed to be preventing this from happening?
 
 no, it isn't.

I find this response somewhat mysterious.
-- 
a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/"Eric S. Raymond/a

Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders,
citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property,
as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
-- "M.T. Cicero", in a newspaper letter of 1788 touching the "militia" 
referred to in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-10 Thread Simon Cozens

On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 01:46:42AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
 brian d foy [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
  On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:
   Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't
   you supposed to be preventing this from happening?
  no, it isn't.
 
 I find this response somewhat mysterious.

Likewise. More so since I didn't even receive it. 
(I think he means that it isn't stagnant. But who can tell?)

Hey, Brian, you're meant to be the PR guy.

Your strategy might work in the corporate world, but in the open source
world, the first rule of PR is to actually make sense. This may come as
a bit of a shock, I know.

The second rule... well, if you didn't know the second rule, you
wouldn't have taken the job on, right?

Brian, you're not in my good books today, this month or this year.

Please sort it out. Now.

-- 
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
in than some that do.
-- Dennis M. Ritchie



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-10 Thread brian d foy

On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Simon Cozens wrote:

 Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't you supposed
 to be preventing this from happening?

no, it isn't.

-- 
brian d foy [EMAIL PROTECTED]




Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-09 Thread Simon Cozens

Eric Raymond's book-in-development ``The Art of Unix Programming'' says
this about the future of Perl:

 Perl usage has grown respectably, but the language itself has been stagnant
 for two years or more.

Bah. Looks like my Perl5-Porters summaries have been completely in vain. :)

The past two years have seen extensions to the language, its portability and
its internals. We've added full Unicode support, a new threading model that
allows fork emulation on platforms like Windows which don't support fork,
(further carrying Unix concepts everywhere we go) new syntax features such as
lexical warnings, lvalue subroutines, weak references, and other bits and
pieces. Many hundreds of lines of documentation have been written or revised.
We've had new hardware support, including another four supported platforms,
(bringing the total to, what, must be about 82 by now?) plus large file and
64-bit support. And the user base keeps growing.

I'm not sure "stagnant" is the best choice of word to describe that.

 Perl's internals are notoriously grubby; it's been understood for years that
 the language's implementation needs to be rewritten from scratch, but an
 attempt in 1999 failed and another seems presently stalled.

If that other is Perl 6, I don't think we're stalled, are we? Language design
is waiting on Larry to produce the spec, and internals design is going on
quietly but steadily. We're in the design stage. That'll probably last a while
because scripting languages and interpreters aren't easy things to design, and
are even harder to get right.

Perhaps we're not giving the right impression. Hey, brian, aren't you supposed
to be preventing this from happening?

Simon

-- 
An ASCII character walks into a bar and orders a double.  "Having a bad
day?" asks the barman.  "Yeah, I have a parity error," replies the ASCII
character.  The barman says, "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off."
-- from Skud



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-09 Thread Bryan C . Warnock

On Friday 09 February 2001 14:06, Simon Cozens wrote:
 I'm not sure "stagnant" is the best choice of word to describe that.

It used to be that feeping creaturism was the scourge - folks clamoring for 
a little stability in their tools and products.  Now it seems what was once 
"stability" is now "stagnatation."  

Microsoft's PR department just earned their paychecks.  More, more, more 
useless things.
 
-- 
Bryan C. Warnock
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-09 Thread Eric S. Raymond

Dan Sugalski [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
 Yes, but you see, we're not generating code. All the rest of the stuff is 
 irrelevant, and Real Hackers don't need to design--it's all self-evident. 
 Besides, you only need to design if you're building one of those Cathedral 
 thingies, and we all know how bad those are. (If you need to reach higher, 
 the correct method is, of course, to add another layer of tents on top of 
 the previous one)

The obvious and cutting rejoinder for me to make would be:

"Hey. If I believed this, I'd still be writing Perl."

But that's a cheap shot, and Larry Wall and I are homies, and I don't
really believe it anyway (well, not *much*...).  So instead I'll ask
you gentlemen to enlighten me.  Larry actually invited me to join the
Perl6 design list (if only as the doomed futile token voice for LISPy
minimalism) and I tried to, but there was some kind of ugly technical
snafu with Skud's listserv and I couldn't get signed on.

What *is* going on over there, anyway?  It is unfortunately true that
the effort looks stalled from the outside.  I'd be happy to revise that
opinion if there are whitepapers or design notes or a Wiki or something
I could look at. 

Anyway, worry not, I don't expect the book to complete for a year.  You
have plenty of time to change my mind.  And I still wouldn't mind 
contributing to the design.

(Cripes.  I only dissed Perl mildly.  I gave Java a much
rougher time and basically consigned Tcl to an early grave -- but no
flamage from *those* guys...)
--
a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/"Eric S. Raymond/a

The right of self-defense is the first law of nature: in most
governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right
within the narrowest limits possible.  Wherever standing armies
are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear
arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited,
liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of
destruction." 
-- Henry St. George Tucker (in Blackstone's Commentaries)



Art of Unix Programming on perl

2001-02-09 Thread Edward Peschko

 Eric Raymond's book-in-development ``The Art of Unix Programming'' says
 this about the future of Perl:

 Perl usage has grown respectably, but the language itself has been stagnant
 for two years or more.

 Bah. Looks like my Perl5-Porters summaries have been completely in vain. :)

yeah, he's full of BS here..

 Perl's internals are notoriously grubby; it's been understood for years that
 the language's implementation needs to be rewritten from scratch, but an
 attempt in 1999 failed and another seems presently stalled.

 If that other is Perl 6, I don't think we're stalled, are we? Language design
 is waiting on Larry to produce the spec, and internals design is going on
 quietly but steadily. We're in the design stage. That'll probably last a while
 because scripting languages and interpreters aren't easy things to design, and
 are even harder to get right.

yeah well, sometimes I think that things *are* stalled. For example, I'm trying
to both update my last book (and perhaps write a new one) and its kind of 
difficult to start let alone convince an editor to put the effort in if you 
don't even have a spec to work from.

And lacking a spec, a status would be nice. Last time I heard, larry was going
to be working on 'chunks of RFCs at a time' and posting the results of those
for digestion. What happened to that? The last thing posted was Dec 20th on 
the subject. Is there a place for statuses that I'm unaware of?

Ed



Re: Art Of Unix Programming on Perl

2001-02-09 Thread Ask Bjoern Hansen

On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Eric S. Raymond wrote:

[...]
 minimalism) and I tried to, but there was some kind of ugly technical
 snafu with Skud's listserv and I couldn't get signed on.

listserv? We use ezmlm around here. :) If you still want to join in
then look at http://dev.perl.org/ - http://dev.perl.org/lists and
http://archive.develooper.com/ ...

we are currently in waiting-for-Larry mode on the language design
and I don't think anyone would claim that it could be done any
faster if we tried to make language _decisions_ on the mailinglists
so that's just kinda how it is.

-- 
ask bjoern hansen - http://ask.netcetera.dk/
more than 70M impressions per day, http://valueclick.com