The State of the Onion 10
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
There are elements of the Perl community that like to push our collective hot buttons. Most of them go by the first name of Anonymous, because they don't really want to stand up for their own opinions. The naysayers could even be right: we may certainly fail in what we're trying to do with Perl 6, but I'd just like to point out that only those people who put their name behind their opinions are allowed to say "I told you so." Anonymous cowards like the "told you so" part as long as it doesn't include the "I." Anonymous cowards don't have an "I," by definition.
Anyway, don't let the teenage trolls distract you from the real issues.
As parents we're setting up some minimum expectations for civilized behavior. Perl should have good manners by default.
Perl should be wary of strangers.
But Perl should be helpful to strangers.
While we're working on their weaknesses, we also have to encourage our kids to develop where they have strengths, even if that makes them not like everyone else. It's okay to be a little weird.
Every kid is different. At least, all my kids are really different. From each other, I mean. Well, and the other way too.
I guess my kids are all alike in one way. None of them is biddable. They're all arguers and will happily debate the merits of any idea presented to them whether it needs further discussion or not. They're certainly unlikely to simply wander off to the slaughter with any stranger that suggests it.
This is the natural result of letting them fight as siblings, with supervision. It's inevitable that siblings will squabble. Your job as parent is to make sure they fight fair. It helps a lot if the parents have already learned how to fight fair. What I mean by fight fair is that you fight about what you're fighting about--you don't fight the other person. If you find yourself dragging all sorts of old baggage into an argument, then you're fighting the person, you're not fighting about something anymore. Nothing makes me happier as a parent than to hear one of my kids make a logical argument at the same time as they're completely pissed off.
If you teach your kids to argue effectively, they'll be resistant to peer pressure. You can't be too careful here. There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs. As a parent, you don't get into a barricade situation and isolate your kids from the outside world forever. Moving out and building other relationships is a natural process, but it needs some supervision.
Perl is learning to care deeply about things like:
This final point is crucial, if you want to understand the state of Perl today. Perl 6 is all about reconciling the supposedly irreconcilable.
Reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable is part of why Perl 6 taking so long. We want to understand the various tensions that have surfaced as people have tried to use and extend Perl 5. In fact, just as Perl 1 was an attempt to digest Unix Culture down into something more coherent, you can view Perl 6 as an attempt to digest CPAN down into something more coherent. Here are some of the irreconcilables we run into when we do that:
OO brings us a world of choices:
Do we even have classes at all?
And if we do, how do they inherit and dispatch?
Is our type system more general than our class system?
Plus a grab bag of other issues:
And finally, the biggie:
Reconciling these known conflicts is all well and good, but our goal as a parent must be a bit larger than that.
Just as a child that leaves the house today will face unpredictable challenges tomorrow, the programming languages of the future will have to reconcile not only the conflicting ideas we know about today, but also the conflicting ideas that we haven't even thought of yet.
We don't know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that, because nobody is smart enough. Some people pretend to be smart enough. That's not something I care about.
Nevertheless, a lot of smart people are really excited about Perl 6 because, as we go about teaching Perl how to reconcile the current crop of irreconcilables, we're also hoping to teach Perl strategies for how to cope with future irreconcilables. It's our vision that Perl can learn to care about what future generations will care about, and not to care about what they don't care about.
That's pretty abstruse, I'll admit. Future-proofing your children is hard. Some of us get excited by the long-term potential of our kids. But it's also exciting when you see their day-to-day progress. And we've make a lot of progress recently.
In terms of Audrey's Perl 6 timeline, we're right at that spot where it says "hack, hack, hack." In a year or so we'll be up here saying, "What's the big deal?"
This is the year that Perl 6 will finally be bootstrapped in Perl 6, one way or another. Actually, make that one way and another. There are several approaches being pursued currently, in a kind of flooding algorithm. One or another of those approaches is bound to work eventually.
Now, anyone who has been following along at home knows that we never, ever promise a delivery date for Perl 6. Nevertheless, I can point out that many of us hope to have most of a Perl 6 parser written in Perl 6 by this Christmas. The only big question is which VM it will compile down to first. There's a bit of a friendly race between the different implementations, but that's healthy, since they're all aiming to support the same language.
So one of the exciting things that happened very recently is that the Pugs test suite was freed from its Haskell implementation and made available for all the other implementations to test against. There are already roughly 12,000 tests in the test suite, with more coming every day. The Haskell implementation is, of course, the furthest along in terms of passing tests, but the other approaches are already starting to pass the various basic sanity tests, and as many of you know, getting the first test to pass is already a large part of the work.
So the plan is for Perl 6 to run consistently on a number of platforms. We suspect that eventually the Parrot platform is likely to be the most efficient way to run Perl 6, and may well be the best way to achieve interoperability with other dynamic languages, especially if Parrot can be embedded whole in other platforms.
But the other virtual machines out there each have their own advantages. The Haskell implementation may well turn out to be the most acceptable to academia, and the best reference implementation for semantics, since Haskell is so picky. JavaScript is already ubiquitous in the browsers. There are various ideas for how to host Perl 6 on top of other VMs as well. Whatever.
But the VM that works the best for Perl right now is, in fact, Perl 5. We've already bootstrapped much of a Perl 5 compiler for Perl 6. Here's a picture of the approach of layering Perl 6 on Perl 5.
Here in the middle we have the Great Moose theory of history.
Other stuff that's going on:
In addition to lots of testing and documentation projects, I'm very happy that Sage La Torra is working on a P5-to-P6 translator for the Google Summer of Code. Soon we'll be able to take Perl 5 code, translate it to Perl 6, and then translate it back to Perl 5 to see how well we did.
Another bootstrapping approach is to take our current Haskell codebase and translate to Perl 6. That could be very important long term in keeping all the various implementations in sync.
There are many, many other exciting things going on all the time. Hang out on the mailing lists and on the IRC channels to find out more.
If you care.
Perl is growing up, but she's doing so in a healthy way, I think. Those of us who are parents tend to try to discourage our kids from getting married too young, because we know how much people change around their twentieth year. Around the age of 19 or 20 is when we start that last major rewiring of our brains to become adults. This year, Perl will be 19 going on 20. She's due for a brain rewiring.
In previous years, Perl was just trying to act grownup by ignoring her past. This year, I'm happy to report that instead of just trying to act grownup, Perl is going back and reintegrating her personality to include the positive aspects of childhood and adolescence. I don't know where Perl will go in the next ten or twenty years. It's my job to say, "I don't care anymore," and kick her out of the house. She's a big girl now, and she's becoming graceful and smart and wise, and she can just decide her future for herself.
Whatever. Thanks for listening, and for learning to care, and for learning to not care. Have a great conference! I don't care how!
