Hi chromatic. I'm not going to engage with you beyond this comment.

----

To all readers,

Imo the issue of a time line (estimated or actual) is immaterial to the original point made up thread (the role of tests in determining a compiler's compliance to a language specification).

But I've decided to reply to chromatic's comment.

With luck chromatic and perhaps others will reply with substance and the result will be a useful HN record about the original P6 time line estimates. I apologize in advance for any further trolling or disconcerting further tangents my comment generates.

Besides quoting chromatic, all text I quote using `>` or "quoting" comes from sources I've linked in footnotes.

----

> If you're going to quote Larry Wall from 2000, be honest and also quote him as saying he wanted to release a beta by TPC 2001 and get the final version out by 2002.

The Perl 6 announcement, which is what I was quoting, doesn't mention these things. [1]

You were, as you tirelessly emphasize, physically in the thick of things, while I was merely reading things online as I found them, roughly contemporaneously with their publication, and then again in recent years. So feel free to provide your own quotes and links.

----

In the meantime, here's what Larry said about time lines in that initial speech:

> We are really jazzed about this. It is our belief that if Perl culture is designed right, Perl will be able to evolve into the language we need 20 years from now. It’s also our belief that only a radical rethinking of both the Perl language and its implementation can energize the community in the long run. In the long run means 10 and 20 years down the road. Finally, it is our belief that Perl 5 will be better supported than it would be if we merely tried to guard what we already have. The best defense is a good offense. Now, this is not going to happen quickly. We expect to have alpha code a year from now, for some definition of alpha. We might even ship it, but we expect it to be well-designed alpha code.

Perhaps mentioning this alpha time line was his first big P6 mistake. [2]

It seems Larry felt comfortable announcing the original one-year-to-alpha estimate. But his comment is clearly about an open source community effort, not something he could assert control over, especially time wise, even if he cared to try. (He had already made it clear, before Perl 6 began, that he did not.) So why did he say such a thing?

Perhaps he was thinking he had pulled off somewhat similar feats on his own before. After all, he wrote the original Perl 5 in about 18 months. And in the new project his anticipated initial role was "merely" thinking up a new language design with a view to keeping what was thought good about Perl 5, dropping what was thought bad, and integrating what he could from the dozen or so RFCs that the design process would supposedly be built around. So perhaps it was on that basis that he felt confident mentioning an alpha time line.

----

Imo, based on what I read at the time and have reread since (some key links are provided in this comment), less than 2 weeks later things were going downhill fast from a project management and time line estimate standpoint: [3]

* An unrealistic draft schedule that got zero feedback ("Nobody had any objections to the draft") was converted into the official one ("so the draft becomes the real one").

* Despite the ominous sign of having no feedback, an alpha millstone (typo intentional) that apparently halved the time from the original estimate Larry had announced ("Vendor liaison begins January 1st 2001 with the alpha release") was added "unilaterally".

* And to wrap up the whole arbitrary schedule "The final release will be on (he picks a date approx. 18 months from the start of the project) 1 January 2002."

While the schedule's overall "long term" time line was clearly a made up fantasy from the start, the short term (weeks) details were no better.

Larry was expected to start work on a language specification on Oct 1st 2000 and deliver it in FINAL form one month later. Imo this was obviously insane even if there were ZERO RFCs.

(Yes, Brendan Eich produced an initial JavaScript design and prototype implementation in 10 days. No, this does not mean it made sense that Larry would produce a new final P6 design in a month.)

Then, by the cut off date of Oct 1st the project had officially accepted not zero, not a dozen, but THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE RFCs. Many were substantive. Many were good ideas, poorly thought through.

Maybe Larry could just about have hit the Oct 14th draft date if he simply summarily rejected around 97% of them without reading them.

Or maybe he could if he had worked on it all, non-stop, without breaks for food etc., for 45 hours a week, spending FIVE MINUTES reading each RFC, FIVE MINUTES thinking about how to integrate it and FIVE MINUTES writing up a draft specification of that aspect.

Except that wouldn't leave time for the rest of the language that the RFCs didn't address, eg what was already in Perl 5.

And anyway, FIVE MINUTES?!? Imo an estimate of FIVE HOURS WALL CLOCK TIME for these tasks would not be unreasonable. FIVE MINUTES is INSANE. (Imo.)

So, imo, as early as Oct 1st 2000, the schedule's millstones were very clearly INSANE expectations.

----

But it's not just Larry and the RFCs.

The more general point is that the project's management failed to adapt to what had actually happened a few weeks into the project. There had been virtually zero input/help for management. That was an ill omen. In addition the language design task had grown to absolutely monstrous proportions. These ill omens were unexpected and then left unmitigated. [3] [4]

The functional response would have been to reset expectations. But that didn't happen. So instead of P6 being considered a project that was the sort of thing that takes a decade if it's just a mild rewrite (Python 3 arguably took longer) it was instead expected by some to be done in 18 months based on nothing more than wishful thinking. That's not a good start expectations wise.

----

I fully expect chromatic to want to attack me and/or Larry, point out that they're an authority and I'm not, suggest I'm throwing folk under a bus, etc. I won't be responding. Please take what they write with a bucket of salt.

----

[1] https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html/

[2] Larry has long said P6 would be a journey of mistakes, just like the journey with P5, albeit hopefully new mistakes.

[3] https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.bootstrap/2000/08/msg11...

[4] https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.meta/2000/09/msg4...

[5] https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.meta/2000/09/msg1...