Warning: for those of you who aren't computer people, this isn't a post for you.
While I was at Yet Another Perl Conference in Columbus, OH, earlier this month, I attended a talk about Rakudo Star, a Perl 6 distribution that's coming out in late July. If you're not a Perl person, here's the quick overview: Perl was first developed in 1987, and went through versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 in 1988, 1989, 1991 and 1994. The change from Perl 4 to Perl 5 between 1993 and 1994 was a major one--a lot of things changed about the language, to the point where one could say that Perl 5 was a different language from Perl 4. Since 1994, there have been lots of changes to Perl 5, and the latest version of it, Perl 5.12, just came out about a month ago.
However, in 2001 work began on designing the next generation of Perl: Perl 6. Since then, there's been work on designing the language, and there's been various and sundry compilers which implement some of the functionality in the language spec.
Rakudo has been one of those compilers. However, it's been just a compiler--no standard modules, no utilities, nada. One of the things that has been stalling work on Rakudo is that not a lot of people use it, so the development team doesn't have a steady stream of "hey, this feature here doesn't work quite right" bugs to work on. So the team working on Rakudo decided to put together a Rakudo release that would have many of the things someone would need to be able to do real work in Perl 6, and they decided to call that release Rakudo Star.
I've wanted to help out with the Perl community for a while, but I haven't been able to come up with something I could do that would help. However, if I started using Rakudo Star to build things, I could help by shaking out some of the bugs in the distribution. I may not have any ideas for what I could do to actually develop Perl 6, but I sure as hell can write code using it and see how it works.
As for what I'm going to write, I don't know yet. I have until late July to make up my mind. If I don't come up with anything else, I'll try porting Tigerlily to Perl 6. How's that for picking a project doomed to fail?
If you've got a better idea, please feel free to suggest one!
Oh, and since part of the point of all this is giving back to the Perl community, I'll be blogging about my experiences trying to write code in Perl 6. Maybe they'll be of use to someone...
While I was at Yet Another Perl Conference in Columbus, OH, earlier this month, I attended a talk about Rakudo Star, a Perl 6 distribution that's coming out in late July. If you're not a Perl person, here's the quick overview: Perl was first developed in 1987, and went through versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 in 1988, 1989, 1991 and 1994. The change from Perl 4 to Perl 5 between 1993 and 1994 was a major one--a lot of things changed about the language, to the point where one could say that Perl 5 was a different language from Perl 4. Since 1994, there have been lots of changes to Perl 5, and the latest version of it, Perl 5.12, just came out about a month ago.
However, in 2001 work began on designing the next generation of Perl: Perl 6. Since then, there's been work on designing the language, and there's been various and sundry compilers which implement some of the functionality in the language spec.
Rakudo has been one of those compilers. However, it's been just a compiler--no standard modules, no utilities, nada. One of the things that has been stalling work on Rakudo is that not a lot of people use it, so the development team doesn't have a steady stream of "hey, this feature here doesn't work quite right" bugs to work on. So the team working on Rakudo decided to put together a Rakudo release that would have many of the things someone would need to be able to do real work in Perl 6, and they decided to call that release Rakudo Star.
I've wanted to help out with the Perl community for a while, but I haven't been able to come up with something I could do that would help. However, if I started using Rakudo Star to build things, I could help by shaking out some of the bugs in the distribution. I may not have any ideas for what I could do to actually develop Perl 6, but I sure as hell can write code using it and see how it works.
As for what I'm going to write, I don't know yet. I have until late July to make up my mind. If I don't come up with anything else, I'll try porting Tigerlily to Perl 6. How's that for picking a project doomed to fail?
If you've got a better idea, please feel free to suggest one!
Oh, and since part of the point of all this is giving back to the Perl community, I'll be blogging about my experiences trying to write code in Perl 6. Maybe they'll be of use to someone...
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