Richard Hainsworth wrote: > Five years seem an eternity in the frenetic world of dot_coms and the like. > But it is not a long time in other areas of human activity.
Indeed. To quote Alan Perlis, "Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?" Perl 6 is nowhere near taking a century, but it is grand. And in fact "Perl 6" is really three major projects, any one of which would reasonably take five years: the specification, the Parrot VM, and the Rakudo implementation. But of course, most people are not aware of how productive the last decade has been in terms of the spec and Parrot, they just know it hasn't produced "/usr/bin/perl6". So I don't think progress has been that slow for three ambitious and mostly volunteer-run projects. Rakudo still has a few years to go before we can begin to worry about whether it will ever be "production-ready". Some people might have given up on P6, but that makes up for the people who would have given up on a half-baked version if it had been released years ago. If it takes 15 years, Perl 6 is still going to be amazing, and that's why people will use it. For now, folks will continue to complain about the chronology; but when it arrives, they will care only about the amazingness. -David
