It seems you may have concluded something not intended.
It is blindingly obvious that the majority of language users, people who
do not have the resources (time, skill set, training) to test a language
before using it, will only start to use a language when it is
recommended by 'those in authority'. I would suggest that the
'popularity' of a language is more a function of how well it is adopted
by teachers of Computer Science at universities and colleges.
I think the issue of a version number is irrelevant, given the vested
interest of the developer to assign a number that will attract users, to
such an extent that there is rule of thumb never to use the first
release, but to wait until the version 'has matured'.
Even if the developers of "Rakudo" release a V1.0, would that in itself
lead to the acceptance of Perl6. I doubt it.
A great deal that is needed to demonstrate the stability and strength of
Perl6 for 'production' purposes has been included in the design from the
very beginning, namely, a MASSIVE test suite. Perl6 also has
documentation and specification and even teaching books, even before the
language has completely matured.
But for Rakudo to be widely adopted as Perl6, it seems to me there have
to be stronger criteria than a version number of 1.0, and a test suite
that is passed demonstrating adherence to a specification.
For my part, I already use Rakudo for nearly all my programming needs -
not that they are particularly burdensome or mission critical. The
elegance of the language in itself is a powerful reason to use it. I am
willing to deal with and work around the problems.
Even in this thread higher standards have been alluded to. But what are
they? How specifically can they be quantified?
Speed, memory, ease of use?
I suggest that Gabor's survey is one way of generating more input about
what Rakudo has to be in order for it to be considered 'production' quality.
Richard
On 01/05/11 16:13, Anderson, Jim wrote:
Hear! Hear!
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Carrera [mailto:dcarr...@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 7:15 AM
To: Richard Hainsworth
Cc: perl6-us...@perl.org
Subject: Re: Production Release - was Re: Questions for Survey about Perl
Although everything you said is technically true, I must point out
that without a definitive release, potential users will tend to avoid
the software. For people not involved in the process (i.e. 99.995% of
Perl users) it is impossible to know when the software is good enough
for use. You may talk about strange attractors and orbits, but I
haven't the faintest clue how big the "orbit" of either Perl 6 or
Rakudo is. Therefore, I cannot recommend it to other people, and I
will hesitate to use it on anything that is very important.
Daniel.
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Richard Hainsworth
<rich...@rusrating.ru> wrote:
So I'd change that to "after a production release of a Perl 6 compiler"
Out of curiosity (because I think it will illuminate some of the
difficulty
Rakudo devs have in declaring something to be a "production release"):
- What constitues a "production release"?
- What was the first production release of Perl 4?
- What was the first production release of Perl 5?
- What was the first production release of Linux?
- At what point was each of the above declared a "production release";
was it concurrent with the release, or some time afterwards?
Pm
Larry responded to a post of mine asking about when Perl6 would be finished
- the post was about the time that Pugs was still being actively developed.
He pointed to the difference between the waterfall model and the strange
attractor model for software development, perl6 progress being measured
using the strange attractor model.
Many of the questions and answers about a 'production release' imply the
waterfall model. The concept here is that some one 'in authority' sets
criteria which define 'finished'. Once the software / language / project
fulfils the criteria - the edge of the waterfall - it is 'finished'. This
has the advantage that everyone knows when to break out the champaign and
have a party. It has the disadvantage that criteria of 'finished' can rarely
be written in advance because to do so requires precognition, or knowledge
of the future. Is there any sophisticated piece of software that is
'perfect', has no bugs, is easy to use? Was MS Vista 'production' quality?
Perl 5.0 was quickly replaced by Perl 5.004 (I think), which include
references.
The strange attractor model implies a process that is never ending, in that
there will always be deviations from the solution 'orbit' or 'path'.
However, there comes a time when for most normal purposes, the solution
orbit will be so 'narrow' that the blips will be not be noticed for most
situations.
In this respect, qualitative statements such as 'when developers accept it'
or 'providers such as ActiveState etc' bundle it are recognition of the
strange attractor measure of progress of Perl6.
Personally, I think that we are in sight of acceptance for Rakudo Star. This
is an implementation of a subset of Perl6. I also believe that when Rakudo
begins to implement Sets, Macros and deals with the problems posed by GUI,
we will see further changes in the Perl6 specification. It is unlikely that
such changes will 'break' Rakudo *.
A question that would be useful to ask is:
When will Rakudo Star be useful for some of your purposes?
a) It is already useful;
b) When running precompiled Rakudo * versions for a test suite of example
programs is as fast as running Perl5 versions, on average.
c) When running (from human readable text to final result) Rakudo * versions
for a test suite of example programs is as fast as Perl5 versions, on
average.
d) When Rakudo * implements a larger subset of Perl6 and/or access
well-written C/C++ libraries efficiently, presupposing (c).
Another question would be what should be in the test suite of example
programs?
The example programs are not the test suite, which verifies consistency with
the specification. The example programs should be designed - I suggest - to
test speed and memory footprint. Ultimately, programmers are interested in
solutions that are quick and use least hardware resources (the human
resource of writing a simple and understandable program being the strongest
part of Perl6, at least I think so).
