J. David Blackstone writes:
> I think the success criteria on http://dev.perl.org/pm/pos.html
> should be more measurable.
You're right. I was happy to have simply avoided "better" and "good",
the classic unmeasurable words :-) I kept "faster" and "easier", two
similarly unpinnable words, though.
> > 1.Benchmarks of text processing programs show improved performance on
> perl6 over perl5.
>
> Yes, but how much improved? Is 50% in everyone's minds, or is 10%
> enough? How much improvement is feasible?
As a first approximation to what is realistic, I'm going to put 10%
in. Everyone's welcome to suggest better numbers.
I also said "Interpreter to make new things easy", and I think the
measurement of this will be whether new things are done or not.
> > 5.The internals API is simpler than in perl5.
>
> I have no suggestions on how to measure this. I think it needs to
> say more, though. I haven't been following -internals, but I'd like
> to hear some of their feedback on how much simpler it's going to get.
Yes, I think I'd like the internals folks to suggest some metrics
here. These will also function as goalposts to aim for during API
design. I'm thinking:
* get a few common types of extensions (wrap a function, wrap a
library, turn structs into hashes, etc.) and have perl6's extensions
be shorter to write than perl5's.
I don't know how to measure the internals, though. Compare perl5
lines of code for a given function to perl6? (may be invalid due to
PIL).
> > 1.perl5 is adequate for peoples' needs, and nobody wants to change to
> perl6.
>
> If Damian Conway keeps throwing out these modules like Switch.pm
> that show his RFCs can happen in Perl5, and if you guys get your way
> with this prototyping thing, we may all feel this way in a few months.
> (Okay, probably not.)
If that happens, I think we'd scrap the current plans and refocus on
simply rewriting the internals. But I think that removing global
warts and historical functions will be enough of an incentive to see
perl6 persist as a language *and* internals change.
Thanks for your comments. I've updated the web pages.
Nat
