Patrick Michaud (pmichaud.com)
I’m just back from lunch at Burgerville with Juan and Jonathan. On the way back into the convention center, I ran into Alasdair, who has been attending the hardware hacking sessions. That made me think that I may want to try to find non-Perl sessions to attend. After all, I tend to keep up with Perl news, so the sessions are of marginal usefulness. Unfortunately, nothing on the schedule looked very interesting to me. I was curious about the session on Open Source Tool Chains for Cloud Computing until I read the description. While it looked cool, it wouldn’t be useful for me in my work. The session would go through provisioning, setup, and maintenance of hosts, all of which we already have well-entrenched solutions for in my day job. So, I ended up back in the Perl track. My friends in the San Diego Perl Mongers group will appreciate that, I think.
Anyway, on to the session.
The name Perl 6 is a language specification, rather than any particular implementation. All of the references and links off-handedly mentioned in this post are available from the Perl 6 website.
Patrick is the lead developer of Rakudo Perl, which is the most feature complete and up-to-date.
Perl 6 has a language specification and a test suite. There are still many places in Perl 6 that are not being tested yet.
Rakudo * (Star) is scheduled to be released a week from tomorrow, targeted at being a useful, usable, early adopter distribution.
At this point, Patrick began to enumerate the new language features and how they work in Perl 6, such as variables, loops, interpolation, and so on. I won’t go into these here, since there are numerous places on the Web where this has been documented.
About half way through this session, I realized that “r0ml” was presenting in another room. If I’d noticed that before, I would have attended that session.