The Perl 6 Advent Calendar

An anonymous reader writes "Larry Wall wasn't joking when he said that Perl 6 would be ready by Christmas. Perhaps not this Christmas, but that hasn't stopped a group of people (including head Rakudo developers Patrick Michaud and Jonathan Worthington) from putting together an Advent Calendar, featuring one cool Perl 6 feature every day until Christmas. Topics currently covered include how to get and build Rakudo (the most actively developed and progressed implementation of Perl 6) and the new Metaoperators. For those wondering when Perl 6 will be finished: Rakudo will be having its official 'production release' (dubbed Rakudo Star) April 2010."

Comments

Word on the street...

[ghostis]

... is Duke Nukem Forever is being rewritten in Perl 6.

Coming of the (perl) Messiah

[negatonium]

Waiting for Perl 6 seems a lot like waiting for the Messiah to arrive. And even when (if) it happens there'll be some people saying "Nope. Not the right one... Keep looking...."

Re:Coming of the (perl) Messiah

[convolvatron]

yes, but you still haven't explained why perl 6 is taking so long

PERL went the way of the dodo...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's too late for PERL. The system and kernel engineers chose to stick with C, PHP ran all over it with less cryptic syntax, and all the web 2.0 "me too" morons are now hacking away in Ruby and Python.

But really, PERL's demise was PHP. Especially since the CLI version of PHP, turning him into a true general purpose language.

Re:This has taken too long

[Trepidity]

More than that--- Perl 6 was announced 9 1/2 years ago! Even O'Reilly's Perl 6 Essentials is now 6 1/2 years old, and some Perl 6 books are into 2nd editions.

Re:perl 5 versus ruby versus perl 6

[abulafia]

How old do you think Python is? Look it up ... ... ... It's 18 years old. In fact, it's only 4 years younger than Python.

I take it then that it is some sort of 4-dimensional Oroboros?

Re:perl 5 versus ruby versus perl 6

[plasticsquirrel]

Why would anyone want to use a glorified VB clone? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Python and Ruby programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Perl for 20+ years, and they'll still be using it for 20+ years after Ruby and Python are a distant memory.

Why would anyone want to use a glorified Unix Shell? I am sick and tired of seeing 'rock-star' Perl programmers trying to shove the new shiny toy in everyone's face. People have been using Lisp for 50+ years, and they'll still be using it for 50+ years after Perl is a distant memory.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:perl 5 versus ruby versus perl 6

[mypalmike]

(problem (((car 'some-apostrophe-shit) lisp (with #letrec foo * (lambda x) (x unmaintainable +))) parentheses (nobody-can-read-this-crap !) (worse-than (cons perl))) (interesting-cs-teaching-language cdr (though))))))))))))))))

Re:This has taken too long

[Luyseyal]

Maybe glue is perl's niche?

I'm sure there is a "turning camels into glue" joke in there somewhere.

-l