All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Perl 6 Infrequently Asked Questions

chromatic on 2007-12-27T18:23:49

  • How can I help?

    We can use smoke testers, developers, people to write documentation, people to read the documentation and tell us where there are problems, people to port libraries, people to write articles, people to write tests, people to keep the web sites up to date, and people to help recruit other people.

  • Thank you. I know this is hard work, and I know it's been a long time coming, and I can't wait to use it and enjoy how much it improves my programming life. I know lots of people have put a lot of effort into giving their work away for free for various reasons, and I know you've taken a lot of abuse and it seems like you'll never finish and no one appreciates what you do, and you'll go long-forgotten after it comes out, but seriously, thank you for everything.

    That wasn't a question, but you're definitely welcome.

Perl 6 in Perl 6

jplindstrom on 2007-12-27T21:30:40

Is there / will there be things to do using something as high level as Perl 6? (rather than PIR/PASM/TGE/whatever or one of the other acronyms that people (like me) feel they are completely clueless about).

Despite not having used it yet, Perl 6 feels fairly familiar, and I'm betting lots of people are eager to use it. Parrot assembler, however nice it is for being assembler, is something completely different.

I think being able to contribute to Perl 6 in Perl 6 is an important threshold event when a lot more people will get involved (and it may be a gateway drug to more low level stuff as well).

Re:Perl 6 in Perl 6

chromatic on 2007-12-27T22:40:37

Good question, and I agree.

Patrick Michaud's latest project is NQP, for Not Quite Perl. This is a small language running on Parrot that, syntactically and semantically, is a subset of Perl 6. It feels a lot like Perl 6, but it doesn't support all of the features of the latter.

It's interesting because it's part of PCT, the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

The best way to write a compiler in Parrot right now is to write a grammar in Perl 6 rules, then write transformation rules from the parse tree to PAST (the Parrot Abstract Syntax Tree) in NQP. There's no Parrot assembly code required.

Now NQP isn't completely Perl 6, so it may not be exactly what you're looking for (and I've agreed to write documentation for it when Patrick gives me an outline), but it's a lot closer to the milestone you mentioned than anything we had to offer even six months ago, so we hope that documenting it and talking about it and helping other people use it will help attract people who, quite rightly, don't have a lot of interest in programming Parrot assembly.

donation

wyang on 2007-12-27T22:57:16

I'm no expert of Perl. But would money be helpful too? Unfortunately I don't have much money either, but donated $20 to The Perl Foundation anyway. Thanks.

how about a chart of "what I can do with it now"

TeeJay on 2007-12-28T13:41:50

Repeating something I just posted to perl6-users (which btw is pretty much silent since october) - it would be nice to see what you can actually do with perl6 now.. i.e. "can I access databases", "can I draw a pie chart", "can I parse a large apache log file", "can I write a CGI script", etc.

Not only would it answer many questions that are repeatedly endlessly about "is it done yet", it could provide a way in to people interested - if there is already something basic that people want to work on it will be easier to find.

I personally would like it as I have some cpan modules I'd be interested in porting, and I'd be happy to host or do such a webpage/site/wiki.

I try to follow the perl 6 meetings, etc but I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the implementation to make head or tail of most of it beyond some hand-wavey vague idea.

Anyway - urls please ?
- Who do I suggest my idea and interest in implementing it to?
- Who's already ported some cpan modules - have they written about the experience..
- where do I get started on porting a CPAN module?

I, and I presume plenty of others, are interested but don't have the familiarity with the project to know where to look sometimes, or what pages are out of date, etc.

Re:how about a chart of "what I can do with it now

chromatic on 2007-12-28T19:21:00

That's a great idea. The Perl 6 Wiki is a good place to start.

If get this going, I'll figure out how to update dev.perl.org/perl6 to point to it.

Re:how about a chart of "what I can do with it now

TeeJay on 2007-12-29T16:15:01

OK - right now it's some hot water with stones in, but http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?what_can_i_do_with_perl_6_today

is a rough outline of what I have in mind - each item should be a link to a page that gives a summary of it's status (possible, buggy, depends on X) and includes or links to examples, benchmarks, articles, code, etc.