All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Scripters, now is the time!

masak on 2008-12-30T10:22:27

Instead of futilely trying to sleep last night, I sat down and tried out an idea in Rakudo. Just a quick throwaway script, comprising a couple of arrays and a few for loops.

Now, I know that as soon as you expand your repertoire into something new, you run into bugs in Rakudo. But this time I ran into 7 bugs in the course of an hour. That surprised even me.

Actually, of those 7 "bugs", one was a TODO feature request, and one was a general question about syntax... but still, 5 bugs in an hour is a lot. This tells me three things:

  1. A lot has happened in Rakudo lately. And the last thing I want is for this to come through as a critique of the Rakudo development process, of which I'm constantly impressed. But the fact that I ran into those bugs tells me that I'm one of the very first people to actually try those features.
  2. Tests are great, but they're no substitute for real programs. Rakudo has a lot of tests, and all of them pass most of the time. But actual programs tend to shake out slightly different kinds of bugs, it turns out. Even if the "actual program" happens to be a toy problem thrown together at one o'clock in the night, as in my case.
  3. We need more people who love to throw together scripts in Perl 6. And who are eager to try them out in Rakudo, and who care enough when things break to report bugs to rakudobug@perl.org. I know you're out there.

Rakudo has evolved at an amazing rate the last few months. You're likely to find Perl 6 features you've heard about already implemented in Rakudo, and most of the time, they work as specced! Did I mention that it feels great to be writing code in Perl 6, and then typing perl6 code-in-perl6 on the command line, and seeing it run?

We need more people who think it's great to write and run Perl 6 programs. With more eyeballs and hands, more bugs will be unearthed sooner, and Rakudo will be a stable, production-usable product sooner.

If you want to get involved, check out eric256's Perl 6 examples repository, and think of something you'd like to add to that. Or take pmichaud's challenge. Or just come visit at #perl6 @ irc.freenode.net and try some quick Perl 6 one-liners on the eval bot hanging around, discussing the finer points of syntax with the regulars. Or just scratch a scripting itch of your own.

Whatever you do, there's a small chance you might turn up what appears to be a bug. If you do, and if you submit that bug to rakudobug@perl.org, you're a hero, because you've made Rakudo Perl 6 a little bit more stable.

I'm sure there's lots of that type of heroes out there, just waiting for some cool new piece of software to try. Try Rakudo.

use Padre to write your Perl 6 code

gabor on 2008-12-30T12:31:38

Let me jump on this bandwagon and ask you to use Padre for writing Perl 6 code.

As of version 0.22 Padre supports Perl 6 syntax highlighting via its Perl 6 plugin and execution on Rakudo via the Parrot plugin.

Using this you will almost directly use the STD.pm for syntax highlighting, which is just the definition of Perl 6.

Obviously if you encounter issues with that you are welcome to the #padre IRC channel to discuss it.

Lots of good code in Pugs

Stevan on 2008-12-30T16:49:28

There was a lot of good Perl 6 examples, programs, modules (with test suites even), etc in the Pugs project. I suspect they would require some amount of cleaning up, but most of the work would already have been done.

Re:Lots of good code in Pugs

masak on 2008-12-30T17:27:52

There was a lot of good Perl 6 examples, programs, modules (with test suites even), etc in the Pugs project. I suspect they would require some amount of cleaning up, but most of the work would already have been done.

Aye. If I understand correctly, the aim of Perl 6 Examples is to salvage scripts from the Pugs repo, and cleaning them up to work either with general Perl 6, or specifically with Rakudo.

Hangman

Ovid on 2008-12-31T15:27:34

I'm currently working on a Hangman program in Rakudo. It mostly works, but the latest builds of Parrot broke on my Mac. Seems I needed a fresh checkout and all is good. Maybe I'll be able to post it soon.

Re:Hangman

masak on 2008-12-31T16:36:40

I'm currently working on a Hangman program in Rakudo.

Nice. Looking forward to seeing it.

Re:Hangman

Ovid on 2008-12-31T16:42:52

Just finished it while waiting for a work test suite to finish running.