On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Richard Hainsworth <rich...@rusrating.ru> wrote: > From what Larry has already said, I dont think he ever will say the Perl 6 > spec is ready. The spec and the language are evolving together. That is what > the waterfall and attractor stuff was all about.
Not relevant. The question is whether people will take Perl 6 seriously without a Perl 6 spec. I think in general no, or at least extremely slowly. Whether Larry Wall is happy with that is for Larry Wall to decide. It's his language. > When I said 'in authority', I meant those opinion-makers (from bloggers to > journalists to heads of major software developers) who start saying 'xxx is > a really cool language'. That's just your personal preference. Other people have other views. Personally I rarely care about what a blog says on these matters, and I would certainly not consider a blogger or a journalist to be some kind of authority. To me an authority has to, at least, know a lot about the subject matter. For example, Rakudo developers. I really don't understand why you would accept the word of a journalist as some sort of authority but don't think that the word of the actual developers, in the form of a release label or version number is relevant. To me that sounds completely backwards. >> 2) Version number may not be relevant to you, but it is relevant to >> others. Therefore, it is relevant to the adoption of Perl 6. > > And here it seems to me that you begin to prove the point I am trying to > make: version numbers are irrelevant as carriers of information about > usefulness, stability, or even maturity of product. I disagree. I have argued this at length already and explained how version numbers are generally used in the FOSS world. There are only so many times I'm willing to repeat myself. > Though I have been using Linux exclusively for about 5 years now, Ok, you are a relatively new user. > When - eventually - > critics compare Perl6 to some other language and discuss the robustness of > the compiler, they will look at the size of the test suites. If they are critics to begin with, the size of the test suite will not impress them. They could just as well conclude that Perl 6 must have a million corner cases and gotchas that have to be tested. I have never seen a language review that I thought was worth reading that made a point out of the number of tests. Daniel. -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
