[Free] Perl Obfuscator

MegaDomo · 2 days

Maybe quote Monty Python a little bit. That's original.

MegaDomo · 2 days

Citation needed.

raiph · 2 days

No one is paid to do the releases, so it's ultimately when someone feels like it.

If "productizing" is a goal, perhaps the Perl 6 grant money would be better spent helping people feel like they should produce releases.

raiph · 2 days

Are they going to be monthly again, or just when someone feels like releasing one?

raiph · 2 days

Star releases are monthly again? Except for last month?

raiph · 2 days

Could you discuss maybe as to why this is a main focus for a language ?

Any control flow beyond the basic call to/return from a function gets a lot easier. This includes exceptions, resumable exceptions, backtracking, cheap generators, coroutines, some concurrency mechanisms, and yes, tail call optimizations.

raiph · 2 days

For example, there have been over 50 monthly releases of the Rakudo compiler.

All of them since Rakudo Star under the flag "Don't use this; wait for the Star release."

raiph · 2 days

Mostly the missing of a JIT compiler and the calling conventions that produce way too many GC-able objects.

Parrot's calling conventions have problems, but PIR and Winxed code can beat Perl 5 on several benchmarks.

One of Rakudo's biggest problems with regard to Parrot's calling conventions was (I don't know if it still is) using exceptions pervasively for control flow. Another of Rakudo's problems is that what it wanted from Parrot's lexical model Parrot didn't provide.

I spent at least year asking Rakudo developers to make a list of the features they wanted from Parrot's lexical model. At least two of us (and maybe three or four) were ready to revise Parrot to meet their needs. It didn't happen while I worked on Parrot.

raiph · 3 days

Am I mistaken...?

Parrot isn't Rakudo's primary performance problem, and the CLR doesn't help Niecza as much as you think.

For example, emulating CPS on the CLR or the JVM (and I assume v8, but I'm not certain) would subject you to a sizable performance penalty.

Parrot has its flaws, but a lot of Rakudo's performance problems have come from the not-great Parrot code it generates. (See, for example, the "Your initializer basic blocks are far too large and no register allocator will handle them effectively" problem I brought up a couple of years before anyone fixed it in Rakudo. It's always easier to blame the garbage collector.)

raiph · 3 days

You seem to have a definition of "the needs of users" that doesn't involve what those users providing us with feedback actually said they needed....

My definition of "the needs of users" includes "things I, as a user, asked for". If your definition of "the needs of users" doesn't include the things I needed to be able to deploy a commercial product based on Rakudo Star to end users, no wonder we disagree.

I don't know of an original estimate for the nom refactor.

I do. Jonathan and Patrick both promised it wouldn't drag on for almost a year back when I said "I don't like the idea; I think it's too risky." Look at the logs. I realize you all are trying to reframe what I said as "You all hate Parrot", but that's complete nonsense.

"Missing releases" sounds as if we would've made as an omission or a mistake....

Rakudo Star stopped coming out every month.

Rakudo Star met its goals.

If Rakudo Star had met its goals, I wouldn't have scuttled our project. I had customers lined up ready to pay. Two years after the initial release date of Rakudo Star, it's still not usable. Speed wasn't an issue--we were improving Rakudo's speed some 5-7% a month for several months. Stability, documentation, ease of upgrading, continual monthly improvements to Star, a growing module ecosystem, lack of regressions--these were the things I asked for and didn't get.

Again, it feels a lot to me like you're trying to apply your personal disillusionment with the Rakudo project to its entire userbase.

I'm telling you as a user what went wrong for me and what's continuing to go wrong. Wasn't the point of Rakudo Star to get feedback?

mr_chromatic · 5 days

Fair enough. I've had this discussion where people who first encounter Lisp see only s-expressions and prefix syntax and think "That's no syntax at all!", whereas I've written a parser that had to account for things like quasi-quoting and know better.

josefonseca · 5 days

The internal encoding of the string operand to eval STRING can change its parsing. Those two features allow you to control how eval treats its operand.

mr_chromatic · 5 days

Lisp has syntax; Common Lisp has quote forms.

mr_chromatic · 6 days

What I find amazing, however, is that perl 5 has more momentum than perl 6.

That shouldn't amaze you. Perl 5 has a lot of people who want to release useful software.

I just think ruby is the better language.

I've also heard people say, in all seriousness, "PHP.net's documentation is great!"

mr_chromatic · 6 days

Unicode 6.1 support, lots of bug fixes.

josefonseca · 6 days

See the Perl 5.16.0 delta.

mr_chromatic · 7 days

So when I see it elsewhere I never know what to think.

Heh. I won't speak for anyone else, but when I want to insult someone (or someones), you won't have to guess as to my intent.

mr_chromatic · 7 days

If people are looking to be ashamed of being from the USA....

You read far too much into a single word choice, and you're applying it to a whole class of people.

tutuca_ · 8 days

You're going to hire the people who are more pleasant to chat with over those who are more proficient in their trades?

That sounds like a false dilemma.

stevieb_ · 10 days

Maybe the best first place to start is by poking at the CSS. There's some theming support already: Customizing PerlMonks CSS. If you come up with a good theme (or half of a good theme and coherent notes on what would make theming easier), post what you have under PerlMonks Discussion and we can lead you to the next steps.

just_news · 11 days

Truthiness is a scalar concept.

stevieb_ · 12 days

That's almost tautological.

It's not. Plenty of people have volunteered over the years. None have delivered.

why does the perlmonks community not hold modern aesthetics in high enough regard

I guess the root question is, why does the perlmonks community not hold modern aesthetics in high enough regard that someone feels motivated to volunteer to fix it?

Did you mean for this to sound condescending and insulting? (I really don't think that's how Five Whys works.)

Am I correct?

Someone would have to do the work. No one has.

stevieb_ · 12 days

Is there any known reasons as to why perlmonks is not evolving with the times?

No one's done the work.

raiph · 14 days

I occasionally get frustrated at your framing the nom refactor as a "debacle".

How would you frame blowing past the original estimate, leaving users in the lurch, missing releases, and finally releasing with known regressions?

Is this your intent?

I'm not going to debate the tone argument. Show me a Perl 6 implementation that takes the needs of users seriously--that makes and meets promises to do so--and I'll change my tune.

If you feel demoralized that some loudmouth on the Internet criticizes what you're working on as misguided and ineffective, then prove to me that I was wrong (especially in the risks I explained in December 2010) or prove to me that I have become and will remain wrong.

Don't tell me that, two years later, Rakudo Star has met its goals.

raiph · 14 days

it seems you actually hitched your wagon a few years ago to the suggestion that perl6 would be something you could leverage in the real world.

You bet. I took people at their word. Worse, I helped spread that word.

Seems the least responsible thing I could do is warn other people not to make the same mistake I did.

mr_chromatic

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