Damian Conway wrote:
Hmmmmmm. On rereading my last message, I feel that it comes across as angry, and critical of this entire discussion or perhaps of particular participants.Well, I for one, never took any offense to any of the responses sent my way. And I appreciate the patience it's likely taken to not just completely Warnock me.
That was certainly not my intent and I apologize if that's how it appeared. I genuinely respect the contributions of every person on this list, and even when (as now) I strenuously disagree with the ideas expressed, I know that those contributions are sincere and offered with the best interests of Perl at heart.
I still stand by every point I made in that last message, but I'm sorry that I let my frustrations leak into the discussion.
Damian
However, I also realize that I might have stepped on some toes of the course of this long discussion. Which was never my intention, and I'll apologize to any who feel I've slighted them in the process.
I do believe everyone on this list shares the same goals of making Perl 6 the possible language that it can be. However, opinions will vary as to what that actually means. Being a group of people that can by and large be described as having a fairly large egos, these differences of opinion can become rather passionate. And passion leads to some pretty extreme responses.
It certainly hasn't helped matters that the exact nature of my proposal has changed in some fairly drastic ways on a regular basis, as I came to a better understanding of what Junctions were, and how they were being implemented. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused, but I do think the resulting discussions have shed some new insights on Junctions, Sets, what it means to have a sigil, why junctions can't just be another class, and several other topics. Poor Mr. Fowles is likely having nightmares figuring out how to summarize all of this.
Positions I still stand by:
- Sets belong in the language, and need more support. This can likely be done at the module level, but I'd like them better incorporated, preferably with their own sigil. However, I believe they can peacefully coexist with Junctions, and one concept does not need to crowd out the other.
- Implicit autothreading is a Bad Thing, and should not happen. This is almost entirely due to the side effects such behavior can generate. To keep the power of junctions viable, explicit threading should be trivially easy, but it should be explicit, none the less.
-- Rod Adams
