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). > > > -- No trees were destroyed in the generation of this email. However, a large number of electrons were severely inconvenienced.
