Re: Critique available

If there's one thing that I know about Larry, it's that he's not stupid.
Neither are the members of the perl community as silly and uninitiated as
the "perl-elite" would make them out to be. I can see _much_ more
information coming out of these RFC's than just the content of the RFC's
in a techical sense moving toward 6.0. There's also general disgrunts,
leanings of the programming community at large, and reasons why the
momentum of the Perl language is falling off.

For example:

"Program Perl in Python"
This nonsensical RFC and its kin "in Java" help to point out that our
syntax is becoming obsolete. Larry picked up on that very early. It is my
personal opinion that Python has nothing whatsoever to brag about in the
same room with Perl, but it does have an object syntax. Ours is clumsy (or
at least a bit ugly), and people want a bit of prettying. I personally
objected to this RFC as a pure technical issue, but I agree with the
meaning behind it. Larry appears to have done so too.

None of this was intended to be highly technical, AFAIK. Logically, since
only a small number of humans know perl internals well enough to express
their ideas in terms of perlguts, it would be ridiculous to expect them to
have an "implementation" section that said much more than "I don't know
how to do it, but I'd like to see it." Logically following that, since
Larry did open this up to the perl population at large, this was
necessarily to be expected. Logically, getting detailed "implementation"
sections could never have been a serious goal.

It would appear, then, that the RFC's were intended to get a feel for
where we as a community would like Perl to go. There's more to the success
of a language than its syntax and internals. I'm told that Eiffel is about
the truest OOP language in existence, but it has a tiny user base. We need
to understand what people want, whether the desires are attainable or not.
Only by paying close attention to the desires of the perl community, why
our advocacy is falling off and our user base is levelling off, can we
hope to please the people who are migrating to lesser languages like Java
and Python.

It sounds very much like you're criticizing the RFC process for not coming
up with a complete 6.0 specification including all internals by the time
they were done. This is very nearsighted. The RFC process was effective
for more reasons than finding new implementations of good and bad ideas,
it was also effective in finding out where Perl needs to grow in order to
be more applicable. I see it as a first, huge step in bringing momentum
back into the Perl language.

Also, your comments about chairs didn't seem to comprehend their purpose.
Perhaps "moderator" might have been more effective, or "mediator" as
between Larry and the working group, or "translator" or whatever else.
"Chair" means nothing on a resume in terms of a volunteer programming
effort, except perhaps for a search of vanity.


Mark-Jason Dominus <[email protected]> wrote:

 > 
 > My critique of the Perl 6 RFC process and following discussion is now
 > available at
 > 
 >         http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html
 > 
 > Mark-Jason Dominus 	  			                 [email protected]
 > I am boycotting Amazon. See http://www.plover.com/~mjd/amazon.html for
 > details.
 >