HN user
I know a little physics, and understand that the physics of double-pendulums is well studied (the case where it hangs with a stationary base is a standard grad school dynamics problem), but what little intuition I have tells me it can't work and would just collapse. Would love to see an illustrative/graphical/animated example of how it works.
My hunch is that balancing a real inverted double pendulum in that way is not possible (and that the clip is a hoax -- perhaps using servos at the middle joint to hold it relatively straight at the right time). Would love to be proven wrong though.
Sorry, didn't mean to address you personally. Edited my post.
Also, will study your Oct. 13 blog post on the matter to learn more about the issues.
For anyone who wants to help Python wrt packaging, get behind [Tarek] and his work on distutils2. That's the future of Python packaging (with Guido's blessing) [^1]. More info on python packaging temporarily at http://guide.python-distribute.org/ .
There's also a [packaging discussion group] which seems to be primarily focused on distutils2 development.
[Tarek]: http://ziade.org/
[^1]: http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/the-fate-of-distu...
[packaging discussion group]: http://groups.google.com/group/the-fellowship-of-the-packagi...
That sounds like a good brief description of an example, but like I said, for people to get that "a ha" moment, it's got to be written up so it can be presented right there in front of them.
My current language is already fairly useful for "Any parsing operation which needs to keep in mind state" ... if you want users to look at Perl 6, then it's going to take concrete written-out examples. No in-jokes or historical anecdotes; just actually show how Perl 6 does it better. Over and over, until it sinks in.
People who don't already know Perl 6 are not going to just take your word for it. They need to be shown easy-to-follow examples of Perl 6 solving problems that are more difficult to solve in their current language.
Perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where grammars and arbitrary tree transformations are more useful than looping over repeated regular expressions?
If you want others to see the utility of these Perl 6 features, they're going to need side-by-side syntax-highlighted clear-as-day examples. Otherwise it's just, "must be some weird Perl 6 feature -- the way I'm doing it in blub works fine for me".