"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

[Posted August 6, 2009 by corbet]

Patrick Michaud, the Rakudo Perl 6 "pumpking," has announced that a usable version of Perl 6 is coming in April, even if the language will not be "finished" by then. "To me, one good answer is to start making releases of Perl 6 that may not implement the entire Perl 6 specification, but that application writers will feel comfortable enough to start using in their projects. I've started to call these 'useful releases' or 'usable releases'. While it might not have every feature described in the Perl 6 synopses, enough features will be present that can make it a reasonable choice for application programs."

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 15:29 UTC (Thu) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link] (4 responses)

That seems sensible. I've been doing some small testing of the language and the VM to get a feel for it, but lately it's already starting to feel like you could actually build a simple application in it.
At least the errors are starting to look meaningful and simple thing are pretty straight forward. But at this moment performance is still abysmal so for me it's still a big no for anything serious. But perhaps a small pet project might find itself being written in perl 6 :-)

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 22:57 UTC (Thu) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] (3 responses)

Performance is my second concern for development, just below removing Parrot blockers for Rakudo.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 23:13 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (2 responses)

btw, what is that image on the perl6 wikipedia page???? a giant cartoon butterfly???

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 0:49 UTC (Fri) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link] (1 responses)

Camelia... http://perl6-projects.org/

Larry Wall came up with it.

-ben

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 15:41 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

They should have made it a Cicada. :)

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 16:57 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] (1 responses)

That release date wouldn't be April 1, would it? ;)

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 22:56 UTC (Thu) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

April 21 or 22, most likely. Rakudo's had 20 monthly releases in a row (though the first several were as part of Parrot). That schedule is unlikely to change.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 17:17 UTC (Thu) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

and lo and behold, the world hasn't ended. moose, catalyst, etc etc...lots of interesting stuff has been happening in the world of perl, and oddly perl5 still works. cpan still rules.

the perl6 team(s) have been doing the right thing. they took out the mystery meat...there are monthly releases and detailed status reports. yeah would we have like to be on perl6.3 by now? sure....but i have more confidence in this team now than ever before.

explore the language...its very cool.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 18:16 UTC (Thu) by tdz (subscriber, #58733) [Link] (7 responses)

> Perl 6 is coming in April, even if the language will not be "finished" by then

I hope that this doesn't turn out for them as it did for the KDE people. Releasing early is good, but releasing a major version too early only gives a lot of bad press. And a pearl like Perl really doesn't deserve that.

Thomas

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 18:43 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link] (2 responses)

The other side of this coin is E17. It has been in development for almost 10 years now. Granted, its mostly usable from cvs snapshots, but the developer base is very small, and without making releases to show off the work, it's hard to recruit new devs. This has been the big success for KDE with the release of 4.0, their developer base has had a strong growth curve, and it plainly shows in the fast evolution of the project.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 6, 2009 21:16 UTC (Thu) by tdz (subscriber, #58733) [Link] (1 responses)

> This has been the big success for KDE with the release of 4.0, their developer base has had a strong growth

The cynic in me just thought that KDE 4 turned every user into a developer; or away completely.

But yes, you are right. Releasing too late is as bad as releasing too early. I just hope that is works out for the Perl folks.

Thomas

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 8:06 UTC (Fri) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link]

And the fact that KDE 4 represents a "latest and greatest" release which effectively meant KDE 3 would virtually end receiving attention from developers.
But perl 6 (at least in te early years) will not deprecate perl 5 at once, in will first just be an alternative language. Once perl 5 runs natively on parrot and performs adequately there is a chance of faster "deprecation" of perl 5 because the border between perl 5 and perl 6 will be fading (and people requiring more and better will probably start shifting towards perl 6).

But until that time I foresee that too many people/companies have too much depending on perl 5 that nobody will keep on supporting it. And that is the main difference with KDE, here nobody really has hard dependencies on KDE 3, just on a working desktop environment and applications that (still) work.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 21:03 UTC (Fri) by cyd (guest, #4153) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think there's any danger of releasing Perl 6 "early", considering it's been in development since 2000.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 23:14 UTC (Fri) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Think of "early" as not ready to have people know the release as Perl 6. Think of "early" as corrupting data, randomly failing, slapping your children, and leaving the seat up.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 8, 2009 2:00 UTC (Sat) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

Perl 6 has been in planning since summer 2000, but Pugs began in 2005 and Rakudo in November 2007.

"Useful and usable" Perl 6 release coming in April

Posted Aug 7, 2009 23:39 UTC (Fri) by plunix (guest, #59652) [Link]

Probably not really an issue. A lot of the reason the early KDE release was seen as so bad was because it's a desktop environment. It thus affects everything a user does on his computer. If it takes longer to do switch between windows or start a new program (for example), overall productivity is going to drop, across the board, for everything done on the computer. A language missing features is only going to affect what you write in that language.

'Useful' releases are a good metric

Posted Aug 7, 2009 7:27 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (4 responses)

Does this plan for a 'useful' release mean an end to the strange focus on 'stable' releases that are in fact just development milestones?

'Useful' releases are a good metric

Posted Aug 7, 2009 10:44 UTC (Fri) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link] (3 responses)

Neither Rakudo nor Parrot gets released without passing their test suite on all target platforms. Hence "stable".

We can predict neither volunteer availability nor unforseen difficulties in adding features, so we don't schedule releases based on the availability of features. Any "milestone" is "it's been a month since the previous release and this release is better than the previous release".

We release new, tested, stable versions of the software we create every month so that we keep trunk stable, work in small steps, and work to a cadence that results in frequent improvements made available on a reliable schedule. We don't play games with version numbers and alphanumeric qualifiers such as "alpha" or "pre-alpha" or "release candidate". We don't maintain several simultaneous branches for "testing" and "stable" and "really stable" and "development happens here, ripe for cherry picking."

In short, *we release software* -- once a month, every month, every release a little more featureful, a little less buggy, a little faster, and a little more polished than the previous.

As Patrick mentions, the words "useful" and "production" have tremendous overloading in English. The word "finished" is all but meaningless when applied to software. His prediction is that the iterative improvement cycle of Rakudo's releases will produce software that is useful for a lot of tasks by April 2010. The May 2010 release will be better yet, and so on, and so forth.

'Useful' releases are a good metric

Posted Aug 8, 2009 11:01 UTC (Sat) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

Neither Rakudo nor Parrot gets released without passing their test suite on all target platforms. Hence "stable".

I see. Normally, I would not expect any software to be released without passing its test suite, even in an 'unstable' release. But I understand where you get the term from.

You are right that qualifiers like 'alpha' and 'production' have all sorts of overloading. But then so does 'stable': in some people's minds it implies 'the API is complete', or 'guaranteed backward and forward compatibility', neither of which apply to Rakudo. That is why you can rub people up the wrong way if you talk about 'stable releases' in a way that doesn't match their expectations.

So I think it would be better to just point out that a new Rakudo release is made regularly, and each release covers more of Perl 6 than the last, although there is not yet a complete implementation. Leave others to decide whether it is 'stable' or 'production' or 'useful' according to their own criteria for those terms.

I expect that when Rakudo implements all of Perl 6 and/or people start using it for production applications, you will start to need separate 'maintenance' and 'new development' branches. You might even say that when a program reaches that stage of development, it can be considered stable.

'Useful' releases are a good metric

Posted Aug 9, 2009 15:53 UTC (Sun) by pmichaud (guest, #60150) [Link]

So I think it would be better to just point out that a new Rakudo release is made regularly, and each release covers more of Perl 6 than the last, although there is not yet a complete implementation. Leave others to decide whether it is 'stable' or 'production' or 'useful' according to their own criteria for those terms.

I agree fully. As I've said in other forums, I have no intention of ever using the word "stable" in association with Rakudo releases. I think "stable" has to be determined within a given context, and even for something like Perl 5 (that has a 15+ year history) the word "stable" can be quite misleading.

So yes, we'll focus on what Rakudo can and cannot do, and try to make it as easy as possible for others to decide if Rakudo is stable enough for their purposes.

'Useful' releases are a good metric

Posted Aug 16, 2009 14:13 UTC (Sun) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

" in some people's minds it implies 'the API is complete', or 'guaranteed backward and forward compatibility', neither of which apply to Rakudo"

And neither can you keep horses in it, which threw me at first... I think most people share neither interpretation though, with "stable release" and "stable across releases" meaning different things (such as API is stable across releases, so changing which release you use won't break things, as opposed to a stable release, meaning it itself won't break things, doesn't have memory leaks or hay in the corner... oops back to horses again).