I spent the whole day with nearly 20 friends from PerlChina, talking mostly about Perl 6 and Pugs, but with a healthy dosage of PAR and my popular 1% of my favourite CPAN talk as well.
It seems to me that indeed the confusing syntax of Perl 5 reference vs sigils is a major hurdle here (and indeed the first question asked about Perl 6 was whether it can work in a sigilless fashion for non-English speakers); coupled with the relatively few information of CPAN modules in Chinese, it made Perl a really unpopular choice. Perl 6, Parrot and Pugs are good as future-proofing, but spreading the knowledge of useful CPAN modules like WWW::Mechanize and Inline has far more visible benefits.
For Perl 6, I browsed the official talks page and failed to find anything in 2005, so I improvised some examples using Pugs's examples/*.p6 and Test.pm as starting points. Right after the meeting I discovered Allison's excellent Perl 6 Update -- I think it really belongs to the talks page.
On the code front today, the big news is I've released 6.0.10. Special thanks to Stevan for compiling the ChangeLog entries! Right after the release, luqui committed .kv on hashes, as well as support for foreach that can iterate more than one values at a time; he also implemented adverbal blocks. The last one broke some parsing logic, which I promptly fixed. Our new committers (nothingmuch and scw) are progressing well on learning Haskell with YAHT; they also kept sending test cases for unimplemented features. Thanks folks!
Two best quotes of the day (slightly paraphrased):
The plane back to Taiwan will take off in 7 hours; I should really sleep now. See you!
