Programming, Software and Code

Pair Programming

15 Jun 2009
legacy  —  Parrot
I was talking with chromatic tonight about Parrot development. One thing that we both want to talk about at YAPC is development priorities, although admittedly we want to talk about them from different angles. chromatic suggests that group work, even pairing up would be a great way to get high-quality code written for important tasks, and I agree. Some of the best work in Parrot-land has been written by pairs of people who are highly synchronized. Just this month Infinoid and I did some amazing work on the IO system together and squeezed a lot of performance out of the bird.

I've said before and I'll say again, that getting people to focus in a volunteer-driven community is like herding cats. You just can't force volunteers to work on any one particular task, although I am a firm believer that you can do a lot to motivate them so the choose to do what's needed. Of course, this is more of a sprint technique then a marathon one, you're not going to get people to do the work that they don't personally want to do for too long. Any longer and it leads to serious burnout.

I am definitly able and willing to work on things that the project needs, although I have plenty of my own pet projects that provide me personal satisfaction. I am, for instance, hell-bent on putting AIO together starting this month. I've also developed a personal vendetta against the GC system that I plan to tackle in the not-so-distant future. Of course, I'm pretty sure the GC is going to become a community priority eventually, and then I'll just be another part of a (hopefully large) development team.

When prompted, chromatic listed these few things off the cuff that he thought were current development priorities:
  1. Parrot Calling Conventions system refactoring and optimizing
  2. Installable Parrot
  3. HLLs running from an Installable Parrot
  4. Fixing Multiple Dispatch semantics (which is really an ancillary part of the PCC work, I think)
To this list I would suggest that the following things are also, more or less, pre-2.0 development priorities. In no particular order:
  1. Replace IMCC with PIRC
  2. The Garbage Collector
  3. The JIT system
  4. The packfile system
  5. L1
I'm sure there are a few more things that I am just not thinking about right now, but I think this is a pretty good representative list of ongoing development tasks that need some work. There are also plenty of other things which aren't priorities but would definitely be nice to have. Follow that with a long list of "green fields" wishlist features that aren't necessary but would be very cool to have.

I'm hoping beyond hope that we can talk about all this cool stuff at YAPC next week. I know the time is really only allocated for a hacking workshop, but maybe some afterhours conversation can address some of these things.

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