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

Re:This has taken too long

[FooAtWFU]

Perl 5.10.0 was out this year, and introduced snazzy new features like the defined-or operator and easier state variables. It's not like they've been neglecting the rest of the language, and it's not like it's going to be difficult to activate backwards compatibility.

I'd worry more about the continuing relevance of Perl in a niche which has come to be dominated more and more by PHP (eww!) and Ruby in recent years. It's not going away, certainly, but its relevance to the future of computing may be somewhat limited despite its technical merit.

Re:This has taken too long

[RDW]

Perl 6 is a new language, not just an upgrade. Perl 5 has not been neglected, and continues to receive updates and new features (some of them originally developed for Perl 6). The plan is to continue Perl 5 support and development indefinitely, irrespective of the status of Perl 6. And of course Perl 5 has its own advent calendar, which this year focuses on interesting stuff you can do with various CPAN modules:

http://www.perladvent.org/2009/

Re:Coming of the (perl) Messiah

[RDW]

'The other question is that there are no implementations of the standard yet...'

The Rakudo guys have now committed themselves to a useful/usable release (if not a complete implementation of everything in the standard) in Spring 2010 (the target is April):

http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411

They intend this to be a release which 'application writers will feel comfortable enough to start using in their projects'.

This probably helped:

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/tpf_receives_large_donation_in.html

Here's where they are now:

http://rakudo.org/status

http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/master/docs/ROADMAP

Re:I first heard Perl 6 when I was in high school

[chromatic]

Perl 6 still hasn't been released.

We've released a new version of Rakudo Perl 6 every month since December 2007. That's 24 months in a row.