>> If we don't ship headline grabbing features in a major release, we might as >> well abandon this project and dedicate our focus on building OpenSearch or >> Elasticsearch.
This brings up memories of the tragedy of Perl 6. I'm going to tell a story. I'm taking no position. Take what you like and leave the rest. I've been in Perl since the late 90s. Some time around 2000 was the Mug Throwing Incident that started the drive to go from Perl 5 to Perl 6. Here's Larry Wall's (creator of Perl) recollection of what happened at a meeting of the perl5-porters group at OSCON. >> We spent the first hour gabbing about all sorts of political and >> organizational issues of a fairly boring and mundane nature. Partway through, >> Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes listening, and then >> he >> very calmly walks over to the coffee service table in the corner, and there >> were about 20 of us in the room, and he picks up a coffee mug and throws it >> against the other wall and he keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other >> wall, and he says "we are f-ed unless we can come up with something that >> will excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and >> doing other things". And it was certainly a catalyst. There needed to be a Perl 6! A major overhaul of the language! Plans were made, working groups set up. Larry set out to imagine what Perl 6 would be. It was going to be Perl 5 compatible. It was going to have its VM that it would run on, called Parrot. There was a team that worked on Parrot (including me). I started a project called Phalanx to beef up the test suites of the top 100 Perl modules on CPAN so that they could be used for compatibility testing of Perl 6 with Perl 5. The whole community was raring to go. We shot for the moon. Turns out Larry spent four years working on designing the language, releasing his Apocalypses and Exegeses on the language. People worked on it as he was writing, but it got to where people wondered where Perl 6 was. I'd go to conferences and I'd get asked "Oh, you're in Perl? When is Perl 6 coming out?" Folks online would ask "Should I just wait until Perl 6 comes out to learn Perl?" Perl 6 never happened. The Parrot VM idea was abandoned. Perl 6 became Raku in 2019. As Perl 6 dragged on, there was much punditry about if Perl 6 was a help or hindrance. Folks brought up the Osborne Effect. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) Many say that Perl 6 helped contribute to the decline of Perl 5. Some people say that Perl 6 drew away people that could be working on Perl 5 and related things around it. Some say that those people would have gone on to other things as well. Does any of this Perl 6 story have lessons for Solr? I don't know, and I'm not in Solr development and the search space enough to say anything about it. But as soon as I read "We have to do something big to gain mindshare or we might as well go do other stuff", Perl 6 immediately came to mind. Andy
