[roch-pm] [Fwd: www.perl.com: Critique of the Perl 6 RFC Process]

Fri Nov 3 18:44:26 CST 2000

-------- Original Message --------
From: "www.perl.com update" <onperl at lists.oreillynet.com>
Subject: www.perl.com: Critique of the Perl 6 RFC Process
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To: <perl-update at pepper.oreillynet.com>

         www.perl.com update
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The Email for www.perl.com Subscribers

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Hello, perl.com subscribers.

Thrilling news this week!  Yet Another Society, the non-profit
organization founded by Kevin Lenzo to put on small Perl conferences
(such as YAPC) and do other good works, has pulled off a coup.  In 
the space of only two weeks, they raised $55,000 so that Damian 
Conway won't have any teaching responsibilities next year, and will 
be free to work on whatever Perl things he wants to.  

Damian has already produced tremendously useful modules like
Text::Balanced and Parse::RecDescent; he is also the three-time 
winner of the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility.  He's done 
all this in his spare time, wedging it in around his teaching duties, 
and it's wonderful to contemplate what he might be able to accomplish 
with an entire year of spare time.

Congratulations to Damian and to Kevin Lenzo, and thanks to the 
generous corporate sponsors, especially Blackstar (which contributed 
half the needed amount), VA Linux, Manning Publications, Stonehenge 
Consulting, and O'Reilly & Associates.  Profuse and extra-grateful 
thanks to the 130 (!!) individual contributors.

Full details, including a list of the good folks who sent money, are
available from http://yetanother.org/damian/

* Larry's Perl 6 Talk Online

The complete transcript of Larry's ALS talk is finally available.
This is the talk he gave a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta to explain
the direction of Perl 6.  Unfortunately the language design was not
finished as he had hoped, because he was still reading through the 360
proposals that had been generated, but the talk was still interesting.

A summary of the key points, and links to the entire transcript, to
Larry's slides, and to the MP3 of the talk, are all available at 
http://dev.perl.org/~ask/als/

* New on www.perl.com

In related news, the big new thing on www.perl.com is a long article 
I wrote about the Perl 6 RFC and discussion process.  I was not happy
with the way things went, and I earnestly hope that if the Perl
community ever does something like this again, we can do better.  Well, 
I don't want to spoil the surprise.  You can read the whole thing at

http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html

Also new this week, another excellent perl5-porters summary from Simon
Cozens.  

* Peripherally Related

In *un*related news Steve Fink, who is a contributor to p5p,
explained in a recent p5p message how he was able to find the original
version of some source code that the Porters needed to investigate.
Steve dug up the whole thing, with the original copyright notices,
which were the part we really needed to see.  How did he do this?  It
turns out he has helped to write a rather novel search engine, which
you can visit at http://www.findsame.com/.  You provide the URL for a
document, and it locates documents that contain similar text.  I
tried this out yesterday, and I was quickly able to locate someone who
had plagiarized one of my www.perl.com articles.

Steve tells me that nobody much is using this tool, and this company
is thinking of discontinuing the service.  I want it to stay around,
and I think you all might find it useful, so that's why I mentioned it.

* Coming Soon

Coming up soon we will have the second installment of Doug Sheppard's
series for people who are just learning to program, and the second
installment of Simon Cozens' series about Gnome.   There's a bunch of
other stuff pending, but I'm not sure when it will arrive, so I'm
going to keep quiet about it until I know better.

Thank you all.  I will be in touch again next week.

Mark Dominus 
Managing Editor

***

Article: Critique of the Perl 6 RFC Process
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html?wwwrrr_20001101.txt
Many of the suggestions put forward during the Perl 6
request-for-comment period revealed a lack of understanding of
the internals and limitations of the language. Mark-Jason
Dominus offers these criticisms in hopes that future RFCs may
avoid the same mistakes -- and the wasted effort. 

Beginner's Introduction to Perl
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html?wwwrrr_20001101.txt
The first part in a new series that introduces Perl to people who
haven't programmed before. If you weren't sure how to get
started with Perl, here's your chance!

Perl Conference: State of the Onion 2000
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html?wwwrrr_20001101.txt
Larry Wall's annual report on the state of Perl, from TPC 4.0
(the fourth annual Perl conference) in Monterey in July 2000. In
this full length transcript, Larry talks about the need for
changes, which has led to the effort to rewrite the language in
Perl 6.

Programming GNOME Applications with Perl
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/gnome.html?wwwrrr_20001101.txt
Simon Cozens shows us how to use Perl to develop applications for
Gnome, the Unix desktop environment.  

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