Strangely Consistent

Theory, practice, and languages, braided together

Perl 6 is now half as old as Perl

Today Perl 6 is as old as Perl was when Perl 6 was announced.

$ perl6 -e 'say Date.new(2000, 7, 18) + (Date.new(2000, 7, 18) - Date.new(1987, 12, 18))'
2013-02-16

The 1987 date is the release of Perl 1. The 2000 date is the throwing of the mugs, which I consider to be Perl 6's birthday.

It's a bit interesting to compare Perl 6 at this point with Perl back then. They are two fairly different projects, even though the people are overlapping to a great extent.

Bottom-up vs top-down

In any programming project, you can start from the small pieces and build upwards to the overreaching goals and ideas, or you can start from the ideas and build downwards to the nitty-gritty stuff.

Perl is a bottom-up project: the Perl 1 release looks puny today. It didn't do much. But it did run. It did solve people's problems. And there's an unbroken chain of commits leading from Perl 1 to today's Perl 5.

Perl 6 is definitely a top-down project. Larry mulled over those RFC's and wrote the Apocalypses. These eventually resulted in the Synopses, which guide implementation work. Implementations reach up towards the spec, and are in some sense always built bottom-up... but on the most zoomed-out scale, Perl 6 is built from the top down.

This difference was very much deliberate. For the Perl 6 project, it was felt that a specification (and a corresponding test suite) was needed. The Pugs project is currently very dormant and not actively developed, but it did result in both the Synopses and the spectest suite. Both are essential artifacts for any Perl 6 implementer.

Second system syndrome

"It's important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time." — Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I

Look, here's the thing: everyone knows that The Big Rewrite isn't a good idea. That's like, Software Project Management 101. Even the people going into this project knew that. The jokes about second systems have been with us from the start, as a part of our cultural heritage.

There have been efforts to mitigate the risks and to calm people on the way. The Ponie project was an effort to put Perl 5 on Parrot, for example, to provide for a migration path or simply a communication bridge from Perl 5 to Perl 6.

Early on, it was also felt that Perl 6 wouldn't be so different from Perl 5, syntactically. Sure, the sigils would come out being invariant, and a comma would have to be added here and there for consistency. But that was about it. Perl 5 programmers would still feel right at home.

Well, guess what? The Ponie project, even with brilliant developers behind it, slowed and finally halted at the height of the Pugs era. Turns out the reasons people wanted to further themselves from the existing Perl 5 internals — that they are a big hairy mess of intertwined C macros — also made porting to Parrot exceedingly difficult. Ponie brought some permanent improvements to the Perl 5 core, but in the end it didn't reach its goal of Perl 5 targeting Parrot.

In the meantime, Perl 6 kept improving and evolving, syntactically as well as semantically. The differences piled up. Perl 6, unfettered by backward-compatibility, could take sometimes vast leaps and reach places in the state-space Perl 5 could only dream of. Also, things kept shaking around and stabilizing, features growing together into a unified whole instead of this. All good and well, but it meant that Perl 6 drifted further away from Perl 5.

So here we are, a decade later, with two distinct languages, and no way for them to interoperate. Having them actually talk to each other is still very much on the agenda. It's just that it's a big undertaking. A couple of recent projects are attempting to put Perl 5 on a platform where it can talk to Perl 6.

I think the biggest thing to realize in all this is that Perl 6, even from the very start, could never have followed the trajectory Perl did. There was one thing that existed in 2000 that didn't exist in 1987, when Perl was announced: Perl. That's why Perl 6 is a top-down project. That's why it's a second system. And that's why the obvious measure-stick of Perl 6 is Perl, with its 13-year head start.

Rubber, meet road

I'm not complaining about this, mind. We should compare Perl 6 to Perl. And to all other scripting languages that have popped up in the same niche. We should steal ideas and adapt to modern practices, like we always do, in both Perl and Perl 6.

But for a top-down project, the biggest challenge is always to reach all the way down to the ground: to actually start being useful for someone. That's perhaps our big challenge. It was back in 2008 when I became heavily involved in the Perl 6 effort, and it still is today: be useful. Be usable. Put food on someone's family.

Perl 6 is useful to me today. Not to the extent that I can write Perl 6 code all day, but to the extent that it makes me more effective and more productive now and then. Bringing that kind of usefulness to others requires lots of work writing modules, documentation, books, and tutorials, as has been discussed elsewhere. We're making some headway with this. I'm more optimistic than I was two years ago.

We also need to work on things such as performance. Perl 6 is fast enough for some things, but overall implementations are still fairly slow. Sometimes ridiculously slow. Good work is being done in this area, too.

But here's what makes me the most optimistic about the Perl 6 effort: after a few years of watching things evolve, I've noticed that while Perl 6 is being developed top-down on the outermost scale, it's actually a series of bottom-up projects that drive Perl 6 forwards.

jnthn likes to tell about how he promised to implement junctions in Rakudo back in 2008, and then realized that junctions were actually tied to method dispatch and the object system, so he had to implement those, too. Later, while pmichaud was rebuilding the parser according to our current understanding of it, jnthn was building Rakudo's meta-object protocol, a project called 6model. Each step on the way replacing the layer below based on what we had found that the layer above required. The 6model work is part of what now enables us to port nqp and Rakudo to the JVM.

That's what makes me optimistic. While Perl 6 is undeniably, unchangeably a top-down project, highly competent people are factoring that top-down knowledge into the design of components in a bottom-up way. What's been happening in these 13 years is that we've become increasingly better and more efficient at building Perl 6.

So, how're we doing?

"Chuck Norris has actually been using Perl 6 since 1987, and has been waiting for Larry to play catch-up. :)" — dukeleto on #perl6

Let's stop and compare the state of Perl 6 today with the state of Perl back in 2000.

What remains?

Which brings us to the last, perhaps most important question. What's left for Perl 6 to become a viable, useful solution to most people out there?

For years I wouldn't go near that question. Just working along, head looking down at the current sub-projects, making Perl 6 more useful to myself and hoping that was enough. But my recent visit to FOSDEM made me realize that some kind of production release is actually within reach — say, a few years away — and a focused effort to reach a releasable state by some criteria would be highly useful for us and for others.

So here are my four criteria. This is what Perl 6 needs to be ready for the world.

Conclusion

Perl 6 is a multi-year project. Though today's date is a little bit arbitrary, it's worthwhile to look both backwards and forwards, to see where we currently are. And though we're structurally different from the Perl project, it's still interesting to make comparisons.

We believe we're building something really nice with Perl 6. 2013 may not be the year when we're finally production-ready, but it sure feels like a year where a lot of significant things will happen (and are already happening). And, unlike 2012, I finally feel ready to speculate about the light at the end of the tunnel.