Hello,
This is the very first (but hopefully far from the last :) email being
sent to the newly created "perlang-hackers" mailing list. In this email
I'll do my best to provide some background information on this mailing
list and the idea behind it.
I've been thinking about setting up some kind of "news"/blog section on
the https://perlang.org web site for some time, to be able to provide
some kind of semi-regular updates, but never gotten around to doing it.
(The web page is in general a pretty outdated mess right now, but that's
a bit of a separate story.) Now, some weeks ago when I was spending some
time on an airplane, I managed to find time to read some of the "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1] book by Eric S Raymond (esr). In this book,
he describes (among other things) the process that led him to develop
the fetchmail mail-retrieval utility. He tells the story[2] of how he
"grew [his] beta list [fetchmail-friends] by adding to it everyone who
contacted [him] about fetchmail".
My thought is to experiment with a similar approach to build some form
of "community" around the project. Until now, it has been quite
convenient to not have people "depend" on Perlang in any way, because
Perlang has been (and still is) a hobby of mine. Still, forming some
form of community would feel useful.
Eric puts it like this in the same chapter referred to earlier (When Is
A Rose Not A Rose):
10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable
resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
That sounds pretty nice, and why would a programming language be any
different in this case, really? No matter how hard I try, with all my
strength, it's still unlikely that _I alone_ would be able to build a
civilization that could stand the test of
time^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wprogramming language that would be really great and
useful. I'll still be limited, both by my own time and also by my
limited experiences.
So, here it is: perlang-hackers. For now, I'm the only subscriber to it
but I'm hoping to add some more people to it soon. Stay tuned. :-)
[1] ISBN 0596001088, also available online here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[2] When Is A Rose Not A Rose
--
Per Lundberg
Perlang maintainer
