I've been doing a little reading on Perl 6 (the new version of Perl currently being designed) and Parrot, the new virtual machine (VM) for Perl and possibly other languages.

You can read some of Larry Wall's (Perl's inventor) thoughts on Perl 6 in his "Apocalypses" at http://dev.perl.ogr/perl6 (along with some material on Parrot). Larry and the Perl people are a smart bunch. But I wonder if they're too smart. Maybe I'm wrong, but they seem to be making Perl so complex that the vast majority of users won't have a clue what they're talking about. I think C++ suffers from this as well. Brilliant hacks, but often beyond us mere mortals. It's easy for the language designer to say "you can just use what you need". But what happens when you have to read (and understand!) someone else's code, that uses a different "subset" than what you know.

Luckily, I'm not brilliant enough to have this problem with Suneido. Although it's all relative and I guess some people would say I have already fallen into this trap. :-)

One interesting thing about Parrot is that it's register based rather than stack based like most other VM's (e.g. Suneido, Java, Smalltalk). This point was brought up in the Advogato discussion of the Suneido language (http://www.advogato.org/article/209.html) which referenced a paper saying registers are better than stack (http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/rob/hotchips.html). Interestingly, this paper claims reference counting garbage collection is better, whereas Parrot claims the opposite.

Parrot claims it will be general purpose, not limited to running Perl. Maybe a future version of Suneido should use Parrot?

Other interesting points from Perl 6:

• return, break, continue are "exceptions', similar to how they are implemented in Suneido blocks
• More "statements" are expressions, e.g. a switch is expression that has a result value. I've been asked why Suneido didn't make all/more statements expressions.
• Perl 6 is considering .name as shorthand for self.name just as it's shorthand for this.name in Suneido
• You can put "catch" in any "block" including a function body, "try" isn't required. I like this.
• do { ... } is an expression that "returns" the result of executing the block
• Although it was proposed that you shouldn't have to "declare" lexically scoped variables, Larry is against this, saying it's too confusing otherwise. But if, as most people recommend, you keep all functions/methods small, then I don't think this argument holds.

But my biggest lasting impression is that Perl is getting very big and very complex. You can change the compiler's parsing grammar on the fly for gosh sakes. How are you going to understand code where you don't even know the syntax without looking at how the writer modified the language?!

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted an entry here. Too busy to ramble on about myself I guess. Or maybe I don't find myself interesting enough to ramble about.

Still plugging away on Suneido. I'm happy enough with how it's going, although I wish there were more hours in the day. My to-do list continues to grow much faster than my done list.

Still, with the help of a few contributors, we're close to porting the server side of Suneido to Linux. It now compiles with GCC and successfully runs all the built-in tests. But this is with MinGW, still under Windows.

I'm ashamed to say I don't even have a Linux system setup (work is all Windows). But obviously, to complete the port, I'm going to need one. So, the age old question of which distribution. I ended up thinking I'd use Redhat, because it's the most common (or at least that's my impression). So I started downloading the latest version. Two days later it's still downloading. I don't know if this is a busy time or if they're always this overloaded. Or, cynically, maybe they prefer slow downloads so people will buy the packaged product. Although, as far as I can tell, no one around here carries out. So while I'm waiting for the download, I thought I'd try Debian, partly because they had a minimal download which let you download the rest later, as required.

First, of course, I had to partition my hard drive. Strangely, there don't seem to be any free non-destructive partitioning programs that handle NTFS. So I forked over the money to upgrade an old version of Partition Magic.

Unfortunately, Debian's install is not quite as "automatic" as some of the others. My first problem was the network card. I picked what I thought was the right driver and it seemed to recognize it, but it didn't work. I ended up installing a copy of Mandrake I had around to see if it would figure out the network card. It did, so I went back to Debian and picked the same driver and it worked.

I probably would have just stuck with Mandrake, at least temporarily, but it kept hanging up - judging by the state of the screen when it hung, I'd guess some problem with video drivers. What happened to uncrashable Linux? So, back to Debian. Next step was to install some more packages. Luckily, downloads from the Debian site were much faster than Redhat. The next hurdle was getting X configured. With basically zero knowledge, this was a challenge. I have a Dell computer with what I assumed was a fairly standard ATI Rage 128 video card. However, there appear to be dozens of version of this card. Eventually, after a 12 hour day, I gave up and went home. I couldn't even get it to work in standard VGA mode, which I'm sure is my own stupidity, but no less frustrating.

Oh well, I'm getting caught up on Linux, the hard way (which is often the best way). Hopefully my Redhat download will complete eventually and I'll give that a try. Or maybe if I get motivated I'll fight with X configuration on Debian.

Meanwhile, it's back to threading issues in Suneido.

I did some more fooling around with ACE, but it looks like it's too large and interdependant to try to use just the pieces I need. Too bad, overall I'm pretty impressed by it. After reading the ACE book I picked up Pattern Oriented Software Architecture - Volume 2 - Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects (POSA2). It covers a lot of the same things as ACE but from a more abstract perspective.

I've been prototyping a new design for the client-server network code in Suneido based on the ideas from ACE and POSA2. It looks like it'll be an improvement over the current code - cleaner, faster, and more portable.

Been "strongly encouraging" pair programming with my programmers. I don't think they're all totally sold on the idea - I'm not even sure I'm 100% convinced. But I have to say that the more we do it, the more I'm sold on it.

jhill - thanks for certifying me as master - I appreciate the gesture. :-)

Picked up the new C++ Network Programming Volume 1 - Mastering Complexity with ACE and Patterns by Schmidt and Huston yesterday. I knew about ACE but I'd never really looked into it too closely. Now I think I might. I'm always much happier to use a third party library if I know about the "philosophy" behind it. I'm always pretty cautious about adding dependencies on third party software to Suneido. It really is a "dependency" - if they have bugs or don't support what you need you can be in trouble. Even if it's open source, that doesn't mean you've got the time or understanding to fix it yourself. But at the same time, leveraging off other people's work can have major benefits. Suneido uses Scintilla for source code editing. We could have rolled our own, but we got a lot nicer component for a lot less effort. Of course, something like that is not too serious a dependency - it could be replaced fairly easily. If I rewrote Suneido's networking to use ACE, that wouldn't be so easy to change. My other concern is size. ACE is large! I don't want to double the size of Suneido just to get a little better networking! I'll have to play around and see what kind of size increase it would entail.

The other nice part about getting a "good" computer book is that it tends to really motivate me, not just in the area of the book, but all over. Maybe because it's "inspiring" to read about other people doing a really excellent job. It makes you want to raise your own standards, do better work, improve stuff. I started thinking about multi-threading Suneido's database server - something I've always been nervous about. And I thrashed out how to clean up the database history mechanism to be cleaner and more complete.

I spent a little time playing with VMware the other day. I really like the idea of being able to run multiple operating systems without re-booting. It would be really useful for testing. And it would let me run Linux as well as Windows. (Too much of my work is Windows based to run Linux most of the time.) In fact when I recently got a new computer I deliberately put more memory (512mb) and more disk (80gb) in order to have space for VMware. But ... as soon as I installed it, Windows XP started to act flaky. Strange delays, networking problems, video problems. All intermittent and unrepeatable. So, much as I like the idea, VMware had to go - Windows is flaky enough as it is. Besides, how much use would it be for testing if it's flaky? Who knows what the source of the problems was, but I don't have the time to try to track it down. Maybe it isn't fully compatible with Windows XP? Or my hardware? Another aspect that scares me away is that there doesn't seem to be any way to "turn it off". Even when you're not using it, it's got all kinds of stuff running - yuck! I wonder if using Linux as the host OS would be better? Maybe I'll give that a try at some point. It's too bad, the idea is cool.

I wonder if I'll ever make Master on Advogato? Without sounding too egotistical, I think my experience, expertise, and investment in open source is as great as many of the other people rated as Master. But I don't know anyone "important", and I'm not working on a highly visible project. (I know that "major project" is part of the criteria, but many of the masters don't seem to be working on "major" projects.) I guess in a way it's a weakness of the rating system - people have to know you. Of course, it doesn't really matter - it is just an ego thing - everyone likes recognition :-)

Enough thinking out loud - time to do a little work!

Got new computers at work and at home, nothing too special - Dell 1.6ghz P4's. They came with XP - so far it seems okay. I'm afraid I find it a little unnerving when it does things like set up new hardware without telling me. What was that Niven quote? Something like "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I put 512mb of memory and an 80gb hard drive in my work machine - I'm planning to put VMware on it so I can test Suneido on different versions of Windows (and also run Linux). I still have some issues that only seem to surface on Win98 (which also happens to be the most common version right now, unfortunately). I only put 256mb and a 20gb drive in the home machine. I'd tell you these numbers boggle my mind but that would date me.

I also finally took the plunge and installed a Linksys wireless access point switch to connect my notebook and desktop at home. Only just installed it last night, but it seems to work pretty slick. Finally I can access the internet and print from couch :-) Of course, one of the reasons I prefered to use my notebook at home was because it was faster than the desktop - that situation is now reversed.

I've been pretty frustrated lately because I don't seem to be spending any time on "real" work. I've been trying to hire a programmer and a customer support person and we got a big pile of resumes this time. Even after weeding out the obvious rejects, we still had about 40 interviews to do. Pretty hard to get anything done in between interviews. And of course, switching computers at work and home is also time consuming. Hopefully things will settle down a bit in the next week or two!