4 ms·

Well, you are definitely more informed about the pre-2012 period. I only really got involved from 2012 onward, so I have no first hand knowledge about that per

by lizmat 6y ago

Well, you are definitely more informed about the pre-2012 period. I only really got involved from 2012 onward, so I have no first hand knowledge about that period, except maybe a few weeks in 2000 (when I was dragged in by Johan Vromans) and 2005 (when I was dragged in by Audrey). I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. > I know this contradicts the official Raku hagiography OOC, which official hagiography are you referring to? Also, I find the use of "hagiography" in relation to Raku a bit strange: if anything, with the rename, the last saint has basically left the building?

chromatic 6y ago
I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. If I recall correctly, that's about the time Jonathan started complaining that the Parrot object model didn't work very well for P6 and wrote his own for PCT, which is still weird to me because he was the primary implementer of the Parrot object model in Parrot. (I don't remember the dates, but he also wrote an object model in C# and another in Java, which you mentioned in another comment.) I tried for a long time to migrate the PCT object model back into Parrot, but both Jonathan and Patrick told me repeatedly it wasn't a priority, so I stopped offering. I'm not the only person who had this experience; I remember someone else having a similar experience with Unicode support. OOC, which official hagiography are you referring to? The one that says "Parrot dumped P6, so the P6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM". I was there. That's not true at all.
- microtherion 6y ago
  As a further clarification of my earlier remarks, when I was talking about Parrot developers not being interested in Perl 6 at all, I was not referring to your era, but to considerably earlier times: https://www.sidhe.org/oldblog/archives/000435.html https://www.sidhe.org/oldblog/archives/000435.html Different eras with different dysfunctions, and different people involved, but for some reason, always personality clashes.
  - chromatic 6y ago
    That was my era too, but it's definitely true that Dan lost interest in P6 well before he stepped down, and Leo never seemed to have a specific interest in P6.
- lizmat 6y ago
  > The one that says "Parrot dumped P6, so the P6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM". I don't think that I ever implied that. To me, in one sentence, it's more like "Parrot and Perl 6 diverged, so that Parrot was no longer a good fit for Perl 6, so the Perl 6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM"
  - chromatic 6y ago
    Parrot and Perl 6 diverged To me this reads like the "mistakes were made" phrasing used when someone wants to be technically accurate but not say anything meaningful. Regardless of whatever Raku developers and advocates say, I, as a lead developer of Parrot, went out of my way to make it work better for P6. Patrick asked me not to do certain things and so I didn't do those things. Maybe that was my mistake. But it's categorically untrue that Parrot wanted to get rid of P6 or considered P6 an afterthought or wasn't willing and able to be receptive to P6's needs, and I'm disappointed that that untruth continues to persist.
    - lizmat 6y ago
      Regardless of whatever Raku developers and advocates say, I, as a lead developer of Parrot, went out of my way to make it work better for P6. May I point out that basically nobody of the then Perl 6 team (except Jonathan) is currently involved in the development of Raku? So please don't transfer your mistrust to these people: they have no beef in this. But it's categorically untrue that Parrot wanted to get rid of P6 or considered P6 an afterthought or wasn't willing and able to be receptive to P6's needs, and I'm disappointed that that untruth continues to persist. Well, maybe I don't have anything meaningful to say about this, as I have no firsthand experience in the matter. So the only thing I can do in this case, is trying to be technically correct. I believe you had the best intentions towards Parrot and towards Perl 6 (which for some reason you keep mentioning as P6 in your replies). But, for whatever reason, it did not work out. We can keep discussing the past in that respect, but I'd rather work on the future instead. If you really want to get the history straight, I'd suggest to write a book about it, similar to http://friendlyorangeglow.com http://friendlyorangeglow.com which taught me a lot about the people developing the system I grew up with. Good and bad.
raiph 6y ago
> I only really got involved from 2012 onward, so I have no first hand knowledge about that period, except maybe a few weeks I'm in roughly the same boat. I too dipped in and out starting in 2000, and had been reading contemporary discussions on and off from around 2009. I want to draw your attention to some things I know due to publicly available records, things I think shed light on what really happened. The first thing is that Rakudo began technically shifting to a multiple backend architecture in mid 2009: * Following Jesse Vincent's summer 2009 discussion with Patrick Michaud about Perl 6 running on JVM and .NET, NQP was rewritten in the fall of 2009 to support multiple backends.[0] * jnthn edited his website to say his first interest in working on Perl 6 going forward was "Transforming Rakudo from a single backend compiler to one capable of targeting multiple backends".[1] > I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. As explained above, Patrick had already focused his and jnthn's efforts on a multiple backend Rakudo in mid 2009, a year before Rakudo Star. And, as chromatic has said, and the record shows, commits to Parrot "fell off a cliff" in early 2011, about 6 months after Rakudo Star, and a year before the dates of the first commit timestamps in MoarVM's git history, in Q1 2012. ---- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g#t=2m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g#t=2m [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091218092004/http://jnthn.net/perl6/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091218092004/http://jnthn.net/p...
- chromatic 6y ago
  The first thing is that Rakudo began technically shifting to a multiple backend architecture in mid 2009 Weird how almost nothing Patrick talked about in that talk panned out -- no JVM backend, no CLR backend (the one that Jonathan talked about in that blog post too), no JavaScript backend, no Tcl, no Perl, no Ruby, no Python frontends. In fact, it's amazing how that fourth rewrite of NQP ended up not working at all for any of the backends Patrick showed on his slide. Or at least not working yet. the record shows, commits to Parrot "fell off a cliff" in early 2011, about 6 months after Rakudo Star How strange that that happened just after the developer summit where I said that the NQP strategy was going to leave Parrot developers in a dead end. Imagine that -- people don't want to stick around on a project that's continually undercut by bad technical decisions. Thanks for finally confirming what I've been saying for years.

by lizmat 6y ago

chromatic 6y ago

I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. If I recall correctly, that's about the time Jonathan started complaining that the Parrot object model didn't work very well for P6 and wrote his own for PCT, which is still weird to me because he was the primary implementer of the Parrot object model in Parrot. (I don't remember the dates, but he also wrote an object model in C# and another in Java, which you mentioned in another comment.) I tried for a long time to migrate the PCT object model back into Parrot, but both Jonathan and Patrick told me repeatedly it wasn't a priority, so I stopped offering. I'm not the only person who had this experience; I remember someone else having a similar experience with Unicode support. OOC, which official hagiography are you referring to? The one that says "Parrot dumped P6, so the P6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM". I was there. That's not true at all.

microtherion 6y ago
As a further clarification of my earlier remarks, when I was talking about Parrot developers not being interested in Perl 6 at all, I was not referring to your era, but to considerably earlier times: https://www.sidhe.org/oldblog/archives/000435.html https://www.sidhe.org/oldblog/archives/000435.html Different eras with different dysfunctions, and different people involved, but for some reason, always personality clashes.
- chromatic 6y ago
  That was my era too, but it's definitely true that Dan lost interest in P6 well before he stepped down, and Leo never seemed to have a specific interest in P6.
lizmat 6y ago
> The one that says "Parrot dumped P6, so the P6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM". I don't think that I ever implied that. To me, in one sentence, it's more like "Parrot and Perl 6 diverged, so that Parrot was no longer a good fit for Perl 6, so the Perl 6 developers had no choice but to write their own VM"
- chromatic 6y ago
  Parrot and Perl 6 diverged To me this reads like the "mistakes were made" phrasing used when someone wants to be technically accurate but not say anything meaningful. Regardless of whatever Raku developers and advocates say, I, as a lead developer of Parrot, went out of my way to make it work better for P6. Patrick asked me not to do certain things and so I didn't do those things. Maybe that was my mistake. But it's categorically untrue that Parrot wanted to get rid of P6 or considered P6 an afterthought or wasn't willing and able to be receptive to P6's needs, and I'm disappointed that that untruth continues to persist.
  - lizmat 6y ago
    Regardless of whatever Raku developers and advocates say, I, as a lead developer of Parrot, went out of my way to make it work better for P6. May I point out that basically nobody of the then Perl 6 team (except Jonathan) is currently involved in the development of Raku? So please don't transfer your mistrust to these people: they have no beef in this. But it's categorically untrue that Parrot wanted to get rid of P6 or considered P6 an afterthought or wasn't willing and able to be receptive to P6's needs, and I'm disappointed that that untruth continues to persist. Well, maybe I don't have anything meaningful to say about this, as I have no firsthand experience in the matter. So the only thing I can do in this case, is trying to be technically correct. I believe you had the best intentions towards Parrot and towards Perl 6 (which for some reason you keep mentioning as P6 in your replies). But, for whatever reason, it did not work out. We can keep discussing the past in that respect, but I'd rather work on the future instead. If you really want to get the history straight, I'd suggest to write a book about it, similar to http://friendlyorangeglow.com http://friendlyorangeglow.com which taught me a lot about the people developing the system I grew up with. Good and bad.

raiph 6y ago

> I only really got involved from 2012 onward, so I have no first hand knowledge about that period, except maybe a few weeks I'm in roughly the same boat. I too dipped in and out starting in 2000, and had been reading contemporary discussions on and off from around 2009. I want to draw your attention to some things I know due to publicly available records, things I think shed light on what really happened. The first thing is that Rakudo began technically shifting to a multiple backend architecture in mid 2009: * Following Jesse Vincent's summer 2009 discussion with Patrick Michaud about Perl 6 running on JVM and .NET, NQP was rewritten in the fall of 2009 to support multiple backends.[0] * jnthn edited his website to say his first interest in working on Perl 6 going forward was "Transforming Rakudo from a single backend compiler to one capable of targeting multiple backends".[1] > I just know second-hand that something broke the trust between the Perl 6 and Parrot developers around the first Rakudo Star release. And that strengthened the notion that another backend for Perl 6 was needed. As explained above, Patrick had already focused his and jnthn's efforts on a multiple backend Rakudo in mid 2009, a year before Rakudo Star. And, as chromatic has said, and the record shows, commits to Parrot "fell off a cliff" in early 2011, about 6 months after Rakudo Star, and a year before the dates of the first commit timestamps in MoarVM's git history, in Q1 2012. ---- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g#t=2m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g#t=2m [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20091218092004/http://jnthn.net/perl6/ http://web.archive.org/web/20091218092004/http://jnthn.net/p...

chromatic 6y ago
The first thing is that Rakudo began technically shifting to a multiple backend architecture in mid 2009 Weird how almost nothing Patrick talked about in that talk panned out -- no JVM backend, no CLR backend (the one that Jonathan talked about in that blog post too), no JavaScript backend, no Tcl, no Perl, no Ruby, no Python frontends. In fact, it's amazing how that fourth rewrite of NQP ended up not working at all for any of the backends Patrick showed on his slide. Or at least not working yet. the record shows, commits to Parrot "fell off a cliff" in early 2011, about 6 months after Rakudo Star How strange that that happened just after the developer summit where I said that the NQP strategy was going to leave Parrot developers in a dead end. Imagine that -- people don't want to stick around on a project that's continually undercut by bad technical decisions. Thanks for finally confirming what I've been saying for years.