Food for thought (and my previous squaak return post)

[Jonathan "Duke" Leto]

Howdy,

Thanks for your valuable feedback Jay!

I agree that it is very important that our Squaak tutorial be kept up-to-date.

We need to think about how we can automate this a bit more, i.e. have actual
tests that will fail if Squaak breaks.

Again, your feedback on Parrot is extremely valuable to us, please
never feel afraid to tell us about pain points or things that you
think can be improved.

Also, thanks for volunteering to help us by telling us what you had to
do to get Squaak working on a recent parrot!

Duke

PS: Is the R-related parrot stuff that you mentioned available
somewhere public? I would love to take a look and possibly help (if I
can be useful).



On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 8:10 AM, Jay Emerson <jayemerson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wanted to note that I finally did manage to modify squaak
> subroutines (functions) to allow returns, something that I did
> previously in 2.8.0 but struggled with in 3.3.0.  This brings up a
> point related to Andrew's post, below.
>
> If I were being paid to work on this, I think that squaak and the
> associated tutorial is high-priority; people new to Parrot will almost
> certainly start here, and people developing a new language will rely
> heavily upon the tutorial.  Over the last two years I've worked on a
> bare-bones grammar for the R language, several times.  When new
> versions of Parrot evolved, my parser broke.  Similarly, older
> versions of squaak were broken by Parrot updates.  Frustrating, but
> absolutely necessary: the evolution of Parrot is far more important
> than maintaining backwards compatibility.  At the same time, the fast
> evolution of Parrot risks alienating a group of potentially valuable
> contributors.
>
> If the process of updating squaak in parallel with the evolution of
> Parrot were documented, it would be a little friendlier for people
> like me.  To this purpose, I hereby volunteer to document what I
> needed to do with function returns in 3.3.0, contrasting this to the
> previously-blogged solution that worked with 2.8.0.  How this is used
> (other than a post to this list) is up to you guys.  I'll try to do
> this in the next few days.
>
> Jay
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Howdy,
>
> At the Parrot/Perl 6 BOF at YAPC we are trying to figure out how we can focus
> more on the most important things that need to happen in Parrot.
>
> To facilitate this, please conduct this thought experiment:
>
> If you were being paid to hack on Parrot, which things would you be expected to
> work on?
>
> If you can formulate an answer to this, please respond to this email and let
> others know. You won't be held to this, and no one is going to tell anybody to
> stop working on their favorite pet project, but we feel that if Parrot hackers
> keep this in mind and communicate it, we can better focus our energies on
> the most important things that need to happen.
>
> Duke
>
> --
> John W. Emerson (Jay)
> Associate Professor of Statistics
> Department of Statistics
> Yale University
> http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
>



-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net>
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