Falling off the Ironman wagon

*sighs* I've fallen off the wagon. I knew I should have posted last week, but I didn't. Blogging is much harder than I thought. If you know me at all, you know that I have at least one opinion about nearly every topic in the word. I love discussing pretty much every topic, particularly if there are more than two options and it's impossible to determine which is better in any given situation. Those kinds of indeterminate discussions are absolutely fun.

Yet, here we are - I have people actually reading this blog and I can't actually write something every 8 days. I think it's because people aren't telling me how wrong I am on a regular basis. :)

The first "usable" release of P6

Patrick Michaud just discussed the idea of releasing Rakudo, the Perl6 implementation bootstrapped in Perl6 targeting Parrot. He makes a very interesting point that language development doesn't go for a static target. Instead, it's very evolutionary. And, so, his goal is to have a "usable" and "useful" release of Perl 6 by Spring 2010 (April-ish).

So, what does this mean? Well, in my mind, it means a few things.

The first is that we, as a community, have been thinking we're going to get the most amazing thing in the world from the get-go. And, in retrospect, it's rather obvious that this just isn't reasonable. The whole point of agile development (and, believe me, P6 development is nothing if not agile!) is that you "release early, release often".

The second is that, frankly, a well-supported feature-light Perl 6 now is much better than a well-supported feature-complete Perl 6 released right before Duke Nuke'em Forever. I want to have some frozen API in my grubby hands before I spend my evenings away from my family and hacking on CP6AN stuff.

And, lastly, we need to remember our history. Perl had been around for 10 years before objects and sane packaging were supported at all. Threads? Unicode? Both became stable with 5.8.0 - that's barely five years ago. Moose is less than three years old. DBIx::Class and Catalyst aren't much older. And, frankly, we drove the development of every one of those features. As a dev, I want users to tell me what they want to use. The P6 devs aren't any different.

So, instead of griping that a feature-light P6 will be available, start thinking about how you can (ab)use those P6 features that will be available (and we should have that list in the next month or two). Maybe we should start voting for our favorite features and see what we can do to help get them into the first production-ready Rakudo release. Go Team!