Your life moves forward one second at a time. And if a project is part of your life -- if you visit it every day, and follow it closely -- it also moves one second at a time.
But to the general public, the apparent flow of project time is defined by its managers. Time is measured in milestones. Major book releases. Major new adopters of the project. Major upgrades. If you want time to move forward, you need to clearly define and communicate your milestones, to give the community something to rally around and synchronize on, to provide news hooks and talking points and historical points of reference. If your project has fuzzy milestones, it will feel stuck in time.
It's storytelling. People don't want stories to move in real time. They want plot points. Time moves nonlinearly in a story. Nobody has the time to actually live through every single minute of somebody else's life.
This is why companies issue press releases, novelists and filmmakers put out sequels (a sequel helps sell more copies of the original), and software publishers keep releasing upgrades (each upgrade bumps up sales, if only because it gives news agencies and potential customers a reason to check out the product again.)
If Perl feels like it's stuck in time, it's because the community stopped time nearly a decade ago. They blocked future major releases of Perl 5 by assigning the name "Perl 6" to something else, a move that makes the invention of New Coke look like marketing genius, and which perhaps explains why -- although Perl 5 is said to "be much better than it was five years ago" -- none of the featured books on books.perl.org are much less than five years old, and many of them are nine or ten. New ideas are sold by new books, and new books are sold by version upgrades. Just ask the Pragmatic Programmers, who will presumably come out with the fourth edition of Agile Web Development with Rails in five years when Rails 3 ships. If Rails 3 doesn't ship, nobody will bother to revise the books, because the revisions won't sell well -- not as well as they will when they are coordinated with the news push around Rails 3.
Anywa, back to Perl. Perl 6 was announced in 2000. Then it didn't ship. Then it didn't ship some more. And now it looks as if the whole idea of shipping Perl 6 on a specific date is being deprecated:
Big news from the current Perl conference YAPC Europe 2009 here in Lisbon is that Rakudo (star) will be released in spring 2010. Rakudo is Perl 6 on Parrot, which is an equivalent to the JVM or CLI.
Is that an official Perl 6 release? Well, it is the nearest to official that you will see. The Perl 6 team are keen to point out that there will be no such thing as a official version, just different implementations
So perhaps Perl 6 will never officially begin, just as the Perl 5 described by the Camel Book (last revised nine years ago) will never officially end. And so I fear it will be deja vu all over again.
>>If Perl feels like it's stuck in time, it's because the community stopped time nearly a decade ago.
Uh... jrockway, chromatic mst etc have listed cool new developments over just the last few years.
Are you doing language wars, or can you motivate why all that is wrong?
>>looks as if the whole idea of shipping Perl 6 on a specific date is being deprecated
What you quote says (afaik) -- Perl6 has a specification, so there will be multiple implementations. None will be the "official" one. That is a feature.
I'm sorry, but you seem to not know what you're talking about? Have I been trolled?
Edit: "A decade"? That was even before testing took over the Perl world, iirc... Damn, I must have been trolled. (Fixed simple grammar, made a sentence clearer.)
But to the general public, the apparent flow of project time is defined by its managers. Time is measured in milestones. Major book releases. Major new adopters of the project. Major upgrades. If you want time to move forward, you need to clearly define and communicate your milestones, to give the community something to rally around and synchronize on, to provide news hooks and talking points and historical points of reference. If your project has fuzzy milestones, it will feel stuck in time.
It's storytelling. People don't want stories to move in real time. They want plot points. Time moves nonlinearly in a story. Nobody has the time to actually live through every single minute of somebody else's life.
This is why companies issue press releases, novelists and filmmakers put out sequels (a sequel helps sell more copies of the original), and software publishers keep releasing upgrades (each upgrade bumps up sales, if only because it gives news agencies and potential customers a reason to check out the product again.)
If Perl feels like it's stuck in time, it's because the community stopped time nearly a decade ago. They blocked future major releases of Perl 5 by assigning the name "Perl 6" to something else, a move that makes the invention of New Coke look like marketing genius, and which perhaps explains why -- although Perl 5 is said to "be much better than it was five years ago" -- none of the featured books on books.perl.org are much less than five years old, and many of them are nine or ten. New ideas are sold by new books, and new books are sold by version upgrades. Just ask the Pragmatic Programmers, who will presumably come out with the fourth edition of Agile Web Development with Rails in five years when Rails 3 ships. If Rails 3 doesn't ship, nobody will bother to revise the books, because the revisions won't sell well -- not as well as they will when they are coordinated with the news push around Rails 3.
Anywa, back to Perl. Perl 6 was announced in 2000. Then it didn't ship. Then it didn't ship some more. And now it looks as if the whole idea of shipping Perl 6 on a specific date is being deprecated:
http://darkeside.blogspot.com/2009/08/perl-6-gets-release-da...
Big news from the current Perl conference YAPC Europe 2009 here in Lisbon is that Rakudo (star) will be released in spring 2010. Rakudo is Perl 6 on Parrot, which is an equivalent to the JVM or CLI.
Is that an official Perl 6 release? Well, it is the nearest to official that you will see. The Perl 6 team are keen to point out that there will be no such thing as a official version, just different implementations
So perhaps Perl 6 will never officially begin, just as the Perl 5 described by the Camel Book (last revised nine years ago) will never officially end. And so I fear it will be deja vu all over again.