Michael Lazzaro wrote:
When I come home from work each day, I can see my dog eagerly waiting at the window, just black snout and frenetically wagging tail visible over the sill.
I often think Larry and Damian must feel that way about this group. Poor, comical beasts, but so eager and well-meaning. We greet them so enthusiastically when they've arrived, it's hard for them to get too mad at us. Even when they discover we've peed on the carpet while they've been gone, and they have an awful mess to clean up.
Whilst I won't speak for Larry in this, *I* certainly don't anything anything like that. (And, in truth, I know Larry well enough to be sure that he doesn't either.)
Many of the members of this forum are highly talented and insightful contributers. Many of the ideas expressed here are worthy of serious consideration. For example: Angel Faus had a brilliant suggestion for cleaning up higher order functions, which we instantly adopted. And Luke Palmer's reinterpretation of junction semantics was clearly superior to my original, and will almost certainly be used. I could dig up plenty of other examples of similar contributions. And, with very few exceptions, the rest of the contributers -- though their ideas are not always feasible, elegant, practical, or sometimes even sane ;-) -- do still contribute their time and energies just as generously and with just as deep a desire to make Perl 6 as good as it can possibly be. Yes, there is a lot of tail chasing on this group, and often it only ends when Larry or I propose our own resolution. Yes, I sometimes choose to ignore a thread I see as going nowhere. But without that tail-chasing and dead-ending we mightn't see the underlying problem they're attempting to address in the first place. And we'd have to explore all the non-optimal alternative solutions ourselves. These are all genuine contributions to the design of Perl 6, and command nothing but my highest respect. Damian
