# Copyright (C) 2003-2007, The Perl Foundation. =pod =head0 Project Overview Z Perl 6 is the next major version of Perl. It is a significant update of the language, and the first version of Perl that is defined by a specification, not by a reference implementation. The goal of Perl 6 is to add support for much-needed new features, and still be cleaner, faster, and easier to use. The X Perl 6 project is vast and complex, but it isn't complicated. The project runs on a simple structure with very little management overhead. That's really the only way it could run. The project doesn't have huge cash or time resources. Its only resource is the people who believe in the project enough to spend their off-hours--their "relaxation" time--working to see it completed. This chapter is as much about people as it is about Perl. =head1 The Birth of Perl 6 Z X Back on July 18, 2000, the second day of the fourth Perl Conference (TPC 4), a small band of Perl geeks gathered to prepare for a meeting of the Perl 5 Porters later that day. The topic at hand was the current state of the Perl community. Four months had passed since the 5.6.0 release of Perl, and although it introduced some important features, none were revolutionary. There had been very little forward movement in the previous year. It was generally acknowledged that the Perl 5 codebase had grown difficult to maintain. At the same time, infighting on the I list had grown so intense that some of the best developers decided to leave. It was time for a change, but no one was quite sure what to do. They started conservatively with plans to change the organization of Perl development. An hour into the discussion, around the time most people nod off in any meeting, Jon Orwant (the reserved, universally respected editor of the Perl Journal) stepped quietly into the room and snapped everyone to attention with an entirely uncharacteristic and well-planned gesture. I A coffee mug hit the wall. "We are *@$!-ed (I) unless we can come up with something that will excite the community (I), because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing other things! (I)" (At least, that's basically how Larry tells it. As is usually the case with events like this, no one remembers exactly what Jon said.) Awakened by this display, the group started to search for a real solution. The language needed room to grow. It needed the freedom to evaluate new features without the obscuring weight of legacy code. The community needed something to believe in, something to get excited about. Within a few hours the group settled on Perl 6, a complete rewrite of Perl. The plan wasn't just a language change, just an implementation change, or just a social change. It was a paradigm shift. Perl 6 would be the community's rewrite of Perl, and the community's rewrite of itself. Would Perl 6, particularly Perl 6 as a complete rewrite, have happened without this meeting? Almost certainly. The signs appeared on the lists, in conferences, and in journals months in advance. If it hadn't started that day, it would have happened a week later, or perhaps a few months later, but it would have happened. It was a step the community needed to take. =head1 In the Beginning . . . Z Let's pause and consider Perl development up to that fateful meeting. Perl 6 is just another link in the chain. The motivations behind it and the directions it will take are partially guided by history. Perl was first developed in 1987 by Larry Wall while he was working as a programmer for Unisys. After creating a configuration and monitoring system for a network that spanned the two American coasts, he was faced with the task of assembling usable reports from log files scattered across the network. The available tools simply weren't up to the job. A linguist at heart, Larry set out to create his own programming language, which he called I. He released the first version of Perl on December 18, 1987 and made it freely available on Usenet (this was before the Internet took over the world, remember). Before long, a small community of Perl programmers grew up around it. The early adopters of Perl were system administrators who had hit the wall with shell scripting, I, and I. However, in the mid-1990s Perl's audience exploded with the advent of the Web, as Perl was tailor-made for CGI scripting and other web-related programming. Meantime, the Perl language itself kept growing, as Larry and others kept adding new features. Probably the most revolutionary change in Perl (until Perl 6, of course) was the addition of modules and object-oriented programming with Perl 5. While this made the transition period from Perl 4 to Perl 5 unusually long, it breathed new life into the language by providing a modern, modular interface. Before Perl 5, Perl was considered simply a scripting language; after Perl 5, it was considered a full-fledged programming language. Larry, meanwhile, started taking a back seat to Perl development and allowed others to take responsibility for adding new features and fixing bugs in Perl. The Perl 5 Porters (p5p) mailing list became the central clearinghouse for bug reports and proposed changes to the Perl language, with the "pumpkin holder" (also known as the "pumpking") being the programmer responsible for integrating the patches and distributing them to the rest of the list for review. Larry continued to follow Perl development, but like a parent determined not to smother his children, he stayed out of the day-to-day development, limiting his involvement to situations in which he was truly needed. Although you might think that the birth of the Perl 6 project would be the first nail in the coffin for Perl 5, that's far from the case. If anything, Perl 5 has had a huge resurgence of development, with Perl 5.7.0 released only two weeks after the initial decision to go ahead with Perl 6. Perl 5.8.0, a July 2002 release by pumpking Jarkko Hietaniemi, includes usable Unicode support, a working threads interface, safe signals, and a significant improvement of the internals with code cleanup, bug fixes, better documentation, and more than quadrupled test coverage. 5.8 has quarterly maintenance releases thanks to pumpking Nicholas ClarkX. The 5.9-5.10 releases have Hugo van der Sanden X as architect and RafaEl Garcia-Suarez Xl> as pumpking. Plans for those releases include enhancements to the regular expression engine, further internals cleanup and a "use perl6ish" pragma that will integrate many of the features of Perl 6. Perl 5 is active and thriving, and will continue to be so even after the release of Perl 6.0. =head1 The Continuing Mission Z Much has changed since the early days of the project. New people join and others leave in a regular "changing of the guard" pattern. Plans change as the work progresses, and the demands of the work and the needs of the community become clearer. Today the Perl 6 project has two major parts: language design and internals. Each branch is relatively autonomous, though there is a healthy amount of coordination between them. =head2 Language Design Z As with all things Perl, the central command of the language design process is X Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl language. Larry is supported by the rest of the design team: X Damian Conway, X Allison Randal, X Dan Sugalski, X Hugo van der Sanden, and X chromatic. We speak in weekly teleconferences and also meet face-to-face a few times a year to hash out ideas for the design documents, or to work through roadblocks standing in the way of design or implementation. The design team is a diverse group, including programmers-for-hire, Perl trainers, and linguists with a broad spectrum of interests and experiences. This diversity has proved quite valuable in the design process, as each member is able to see problems in the design or potential solutions that the other members missed. =head3 Requests for comments (RFCs) Z The first step in designing the new language was the RFC (Request For Comments) process. This spurred an initial burst of community involvement. Anyone was free to submit an X RFC on any subject, whether it was as small as adding an operator, or as big as reworking OO syntax. Most of the proposals were really quite conservative. The RFCs followed a standard format so they would be easier to read and easier to compare. Each RFC was subject to peer review, carried out in an intense few weeks around October 2000. One thing the RFC process demonstrated was that the Perl community still wasn't quite ready to move beyond the infighting that had characterized Perl 5 Porters earlier that year.N). It may seem harsh to people accustomed to the more open and tolerant community of today, but it's an accurate representation of the time when it was written.> Even though few RFCs have been accepted without modification, the process identified a large number of irritants in the language. These have served as signposts for later design efforts. =head3 Apocalypses, Synopses, Exegeses Z X The ApocalypsesN, Synopses, and ExegesesN are an important part of the design process. Larry started the Apocalypse series as a systematic way of answering the RFCs. Each Apocalypse corresponds to a chapter in his book I, and addresses the features in the chapter that are likely to change. However, the Apocalypses have become much more than a simple response to RFCs. Larry has a startling knack for looking at 12 solutions to a problem, pulling out the good bits from each one, and combining them into a solution that is 10 times better than any of the proposals alone. The Apocalypses are an excellent example of this "Larry Effect." He addresses each relevant RFC, and gives reasons why he accepted or rejected various pieces of it. But each Apocalypse also goes beyond a simple "yes" and "no" response to attack the roots of the problems identified in the RFCs. X The Synopses are summaries of each Apocalypse. These act as a quick reference for the current state of design, and are more approachable than the often lengthy Apocalypses. The Synopsis series didn't start until Apocalypse 5, but Luke PalmerX is now working on the retroactive Synopses 2-4. X Damian Conway's Exegeses are extensions of each Apocalypse. The Exegeses are built around practical code examples that apply and explain the new ideas. =head3 The p6l mailing list Z X X X X X X The next body of design work is the Perl 6 Language mailing list (U), often fondly referred to as "p6l." Piers Cawley writes a weekly summary of all the Perl 6 mailing lists. Luke Palmer has been deputized as unofficial referee of the list. He answers questions that don't require the direct involvement of the design team or that have been answered before. The list has approximately 40 regular contributors in any given month, as well as a large number of occasional posters and lurkers. Some people have participated since the very beginning; others appear for a few months and move on. Even though the individuals change, the general tone of p6l is the same. It's an open forum for any ideas on the user-visible parts of Perl 6. In the typical pattern, one person posts an idea and 5 to 10 people respond with criticisms or suggestions. The list periodically travels down a speculative thread like a runaway train, but these eventually run out of steam. Then Larry picks out the golden bits and gently tells the rest that no, he never intended Perl 6 to have neo-vulcan mechanoid scooby-dooby-doos. Even when Larry doesn't post, he follows the list and the traffic serves as a valuable catalyst for his thoughts. =head3 The test suite Z X X X The design documents describe the Perl 6 language in prose, and the test suite is intended to translate that specification into code. In 2005 Audrey Tang started a Perl 6 compiler named I. It is written in Haskell, and moved very fast. The test suite began both as regression tests and as a feature wish list, and is now slowly being translated into an implementation agnostic, offical test suite that can be used by all implementations. Once it is done, every compiler that passes the test suite may name itself I. =cut # vim: sw=3 ts=3 expandtab tw=72