David's Blague

One of my favorite writers is a guy who is currently in the midst of writing a specification for a programming language.  He recently made some changes to the first synopsis of Perl 6, and I am replicating some of it here, because I think it's a useful exhortation.  I hope he doesn't mind:

• The language designer is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and never will be, despite requests for those particular features. Therefore the design process will be spiral, cooperative, and convergent. The rate of convergence is an emergent property, and cannot be forced, only encouraged. As long as anyone is hacking on any implementation of Perl 6 to make it conform to the test suite, or hacking on the test suite to make it reflect consensus of specification, the rate of convergence will be deemed to be positive. If you are unhappy with the current rate of convergence, please cooperate more with someone else you think is interested in convergence.
• The spec will not be frozen prematurely, but will continue to solidify as various aspects of it are proven (or disproven) in various implementations. Many parts of the spec are already effectively frozen, or are in a slushy state. "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."
• All specced features that have not been proven in an implementation should be considered somewhat conjectural, even if not so marked. As implementations start to agree on what is practical and what is not, do not be surprised if some features that are currently specced may be deferred to future versions; these should still be considered long-term direction in the evolution of Perl 6 over time, and the short-term design should be conservative in preserving that long-term evolution. Note that we are not in a hurry to defer any sections of the spec, even if that would give the illusion of progress. Convergence of specs and implementations will happen naturally as we get implementations that are closer to the spec. It is quite likely that the first practical implementation will largely determine which features are considered to be required in 6.0.0.
• Everyone is allowed to panic once. However, continual panic will be deemed poisonous. Nobody gets special treatment, even if they think special treatment is necessary for success. This means you.

This was added to the synopsis with the log comment: "take another lap around Mt Sinai..." Since it's possible the intended message did not get across, even with this addition, I'd like to remind everyone that the next line in that song is, "'til you've learned your lesson."

Labels: perl, perl6, software