eritain
Hakka retains the -m final, instead of merging it to -n. It retains distinct 'round' and 'sharp' (velar and dental) onsets in positions where some Mandarin varieties (including Standard) merge them to the new palatal j/q/x.
The Middle Chinese palatal ny- is lost in Hakka as it is almost everywhere. It merged with r- in Mandarin, y- in Yue, and ng- in Hakka. So you can't read the archaic form directly off any one of those varieties, but you can detect it by comparing any two.
Hakka tonal developments are middle-of-the-road. Like every variety of Chinese, it had the four Middle Chinese tones altered by the voicing feature of the syllable onset, and like every variety outside of Wu/Shanghainese, it then lost the voicing feature itself.
Hakka splits the ping/level tone in two by voicing, like almost every variety does. It splits the ru/entering 'tone' (the syllables with final stops) by voicing, like almost every non-Mandarin variety does, instead of disintegrating it like Mandarin.
In the shang/rising tone, Hakka agrees with Mandarin against Wu and Yue that you don't just split the tone down the middle by voicing; you split off voiced obstruent onsets and leave voiced sonorant onsets alone. It agrees with Mandarin and Wu against Yue that the split-off voiced onsets (whether all of them or just the obstruents) merge into the qu/departing tone.
Hakka agrees with Mandarin against almost everybody else that the qu/departing tone does not split.
(It's not all the pumpkings' fault, either. I think Parrot would still have been doomed if its leadership were constantly flawless, just because it was designed before Perl 6's object system was.)
It's certainly true that the Soviets, and after them Belarus and Ukraine, did/do use the "just leave it alone" strategy for part of their Chernobyl response. But it's by no means the whole story.
> The human body has an immune system that is built to fight foreign objects. Drinking works so well because we overpower the livers defenses
Liver metabolism of active chemicals (including alcohol) is a totally different thing from the immune system. This is like confusing the police with the wastewater treatment authority.
> isolated neurotransmitters are [...] extremely wide relative to the gap in the blood brain barrier [...] insights from the pharmacokinetic effects caused by the chemical structure of caffeine led me to experiment with different methods that combined to make Plusfour 800% more bioavailable.
The neurotransmitters GABA, glutamic acid, serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are all about the same size as caffeine or slightly smaller. So the "too wide" story about why it wasn't working is not compatible with the "make it caffeine-like" story about fixing it.
The pharmacokinetics of a substance depend among other things on its structure, i.e. its identity. You can't give it different pharmacokinetics and have it be the same thing. In the best case, you might be able to create a prodrug of it with a distribution more like what you want -- a classic example is heroin, a prodrug of morphine that gets across the blood-brain barrier better. But that's a matter of chemistry, not a matter of particle size or whatnot.
> The neuro-pharmacokinetic compound in coffee
Pharmacokinetics: the chronology of a drug's activity, including its distribution to different tissues, effect while there, and processing into active or inactive metabolites. Calling caffeine a "neuro-pharmacokinetic compound" is gobbledegook. It's like saying a book is "literary-logistical" because I had it shipped to me.
> Compressing a small molecule down to the nanoscale is very difficult.
In much the same way that compressing the surplus dog population down to an animal of adoptable size is very difficult. Or, as John Wayne might have put it: "Life's very difficult. More difficult if you're stupid."
Anyway, I thought these were large molecules, eh?
> Think about a chemical compound as a [...] sphere
Acceptable, if a bit simplistic.
> and think about a liquid as enough of these spheres holding hands close together
That'll work.
> The purpose of nano-encapsulation is [...] decreasing the diameter of these spheres.
Holy crap, no.
> carbonated rose water
That's the most sensible thing you've said yet.
> Certain vitamins and minerals in Plusfour function to prevent any tolerance. [...] if it can’t get the right nutrients, the brain will run on fumes and cause discomfort and pain. Tolerance is a result of the brain adjusting to scarcity.
Of nutrients? No. Drug tolerance can be a result of the brain adjusting to the scarcity or abundance of the drug, or of some other substance through which the drug acts. Not the result of brain malnourishment.
I could go on, but I don't see the point.
The last time I saw this much piffle in one place, it was trying to sell me a machine to infuse my tap water with magnetic monopoles.
The good news for Perl 6 is that books are incoming. O'Reilly has taken on both Learning Perl 6 (by the formidable teacher brian d foy) for a summer 2017 release, and Think Perl 6 (a translation of Think Python by Laurent Rosenfeld and Allen B. Downey; unedited draft available now). Moritz Lenz is developing his manuscript of Perl 6 by Example publicly on his blog (perlgeek.de), and Ken Youens-Clark has released an e-book on doing metagenomics in Perl 6, which includes a substantial Perl 6 tutorial.
As to CPAN, with Inline::Perl5 the entire Perl 5 CPAN is available to Perl 6 -- and if you call now, we'll throw in Inline::Python for no additional cost!
But yeah, I'm still a lot more comfortable in Perl 5 too.
Why would I think that? I am aware of your recollections. I have read everything you blogged about the collapse of Parrot.
I have also read everything several other people wrote about the inception of MoarVM and the suspension of Parrot support, including key figures from both sides and several third-party observers. I have read the IRC logs of Parrot design meetings, including negotiations with the Rakudo leads, for the period leading up to the rupture. I have read key announcements by Parrot and Rakudo lead designers from earlier than this, wherein I think I see the seeds of the breakdown sown.
I made a detailed study of all this last spring, when I learned about the suspension. I have also been checking in intermittently on Parrot since 2002, and on every Perl 6 implementation I could find since the post-Pugs revival. And since last spring I have been kept aware of your position in particular through sundry comments here and on Reddit; you are a reliable presence whenever someone mentions Perl 6 or Rakudo without condemning it.
I can't speak to specific differences between my opinions and your recollections, since you did not see fit to say what those were. But I am hardly uninformed and I know of no error in what I said (viz., the actual words that I typed).
[1] If I wanted a document to make my point for me, I could hardly do better than the 2003 State of the Onion. Here's where Larry's head was in 2003: Yes, he thought a multi-language VM was just what Perl needed. He also thought that the Perl 6 design was basically done. He clearly didn't think there would be too much difference in kind between Parrot and the p5p runtime, as shown by his speculating that Ponie could be ready to support 5.10 and could entirely replace p5p by 5.12. He had not yet written the Apocalypse on the object system; its release in 2004 is really when it became clear how deep and structural the changes from 5 to 6 would be, and consequently it's also when it really became clear what a VM would need to provide to be good for Perl 6. Heck, in 2003 Larry thought "slow progress" meant a couple of major redesign documents a year, and he thought slow progress was just coming to an end. About the only thing that address was right about is that Larry didn't know very much. (Well, that and the switch statement.) If I'm saying reality disproved early conceptions about the realization of Perl 6, SotO 2003 is Exhibit A.
Parrot isn't wholly abandoned, but Reini Urban is the only person still hacking on it. On the other hand, he is the person most likely to bring Parrot back around to being a good backend for Perl 6, so it has that going for it.
Currently no implementation of Perl 6 targets Parrot. Rakudo used to (indeed, was born on Parrot), but suspended support for Parrot in connection with the push to get Rakudo-on-MoarVM up to 6.0.0 quality by Christmas. The Rakudo team were careful not to say they were writing Parrot off, but they also gave no particular criteria for when they would unsuspend it.
(I in no way speak for Rakudo or anyone else, but I suspect the implicit criteria for unsuspension are three: Parrot must demonstrate, in code, that being a good backend for Perl 6 is a higher priority than being a good backend for entirely hypothetical other clients; it must undertake, survive, and complete a major decrufting if not re-architecting; and of course, it must be more interesting, for enough people, to target Parrot than to hack Perl 6 on Moar, JVM, JS, Mono, the perl5 VM, p2, WebAssembly, native code, the Factor VM, or whatever else.)
There are also those who view MoarVM as the new Parrot -- Parrot as it would have been if its implementation hadn't started until it was clear what Perl 6 would really need under it. (Aaaaaand without the technical or political fallout of "let's make a VM for ALL the dynamic languages!")