Micro-articles on Perl 6 Operators

ferreira on 2007-09-17T17:58:15

Jesse has announced the acceptance of my microgrant proposal. It is a plain simple idea, whose effects are yet to be seen. Comments and feedback most welcome.

The plan is to write a series of blog entries discussing a Perl 6 operator at a time or a small group of closely related ones.

My working hypotheses are:

  • the audience is broader than Perl 6 developers
  • they should be educational
  • they should be light
  • they should not be long
  • they should show some nice Perl 6 code
  • they should be based on what's specified
  • if possible, they should be cool
The goals:
  • make people know more about Perl 6
  • allow them to do that in an entertaining fashion
  • entice the curiosity
  • estimulate the need for Perl 6
  • spread the word

The choice to approach Perl 6 via operators was an artefact. Every single piece of Perl 6 code would present a bunch of features, hopefully good enough to demonstrate the look and feel of the language. And operators cross over the entire realm of the language (even more than with Perl 5). The pretention would be to compose a picture of the language in small doses like Marvin Minsky did in Society of Mind with every chapter in a single page, striving to get a comprehensible whole from the component pieces. It's kind of prententious, but hubris is a quality around here and I hope not to be alone in this endeavour.

Any help will be much appreciated: suggestions, corrections, grammar and typo fixes, rephrasing, etc. As drafts got ready, I will announce them in Perl channels (#perl6 at freenode, use.perl, PerlMonks, perl6-language mailing list) to have a chance to improve the articles to be published at ONLamp site.

Join me. The drafts of the introduction and the first article are here: