Peter Scott on Perl 6 development lists

Peter Scott Peter at PSDT.com
Sat Nov 2 08:43:36 CST 2002


At 11:37 PM 11/1/02 -0800, Duncan Darren wrote:
>I have recently gone back and started reading the Perl 6 Porters 
>Digest, from the beginning where it appeared on perl.com 
>(http://www.perl.com/pub/at/16), 2002.02.14.
>
>I also read Larry's one-and-a-half hour long speech transcript which 
>was dated from mid-2000, linked to from the first message, so I have 
>an easier time seeing when this v6 design stuff was moving forward in 
>an organized fashion.
>
>On the fourth message, for 2002.05.21 
>(http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/05/p6pdigest/THISWEEK-20010501.html), 
>I noticed that Peter Scott was quoted for discussions on "Perl 6 
>Meta", postulating the apropriateness of changing the name of the 
>language to something else to signify how new and fresh it is.
>
>So I found it interesting that some local faces were actively involved 
>in this planning, rather than just people "far away".

Well, I made a few better contributions than just name change 
speculations, at least until the other people on perl6-language evolved 
into a new species :-)

Take a look at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/by-group.html.  I abandoned my 
exception RFC to co-author the mammoth RFC 88, parts of which Larry 
accepted... although no one ever expected him to make so many changes 
to the language.  The one I'm most proud of is RFC 151, which appears 
to have been accepted as is.

>Peter, can you tell me if you know, around how many people would you 
>say are involved with designing Perl 6 and/or implementing or 
>documenting it or Parrot?  I have seen many names in the summaries, 
>but often the same dozen or so keep appearing.

It's not what you would call a step function, more like the usual 
Poisson distribution.  So the question is how far out do you want to go 
into the tail?  But I think you're right about the serious work being 
done by a dozen or so people.

>Also, not having read all the archives yet, was I just seeing a 
>one-off, or are you still involved with those planning lists.

I follow them, but right now they're over my head in discussions of 
bizarre new operators, superpositions, and the like.  I recently gave 
up mailing lists for the NNTP interface via nntp.perl.org and I can 
follow a lot more now.  Eventually they'll get on to some topic where I 
can make some contribution or other.

>Anyway, I'm thinking I may get involved in contributing at some point, 
>if I had the time.

Have at it!  Lots of room there.  Just look for perl.perl6.* groups.
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
http://www.perldebugged.com/




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