Jun 28 2006
YAPC Cap-up
Phew. The back to back conferences are done.
YAPC was a lot of fun. Going in, I was a wee bit hesitant, as I don’t write Perl day to day anymore, and was worried I’d just sort of be bored. Perl 6 shot that theory full of holes. Perl 6, PUGS, and Audrey Tang were all over the place. Clearly I haven’t been paying attention, as the Perl community is alive and kicking, and right on the verge of doing some really great stuff…like, make Ruby and Python look sad and old type stuff.
Perl 6 has become a sort of joke, the vaporware promise of the fresh Perl. Parrot, big on ideas but short on implementation held up the party for quite a long time. Without it, how could anyone start playing with P6? Along comes Audrey, who implements the moving P6 target in Haskell, calls it PUGS, and releases it. Boom. Now we can write Perl 6. It’s slow, hard to compile, but so full of promise that I’ve been all a-flutter for two days.
I’m in the process of compiling / installing the latest and greatest version of PUGS on my laptop so I can jump into it. I’m sure I’ll write more here over time. For now though, if I had to pick one advertised Perl 6 feature that really gets my blood going, it’s “all arrays and hashes are multi-dimensional.”
Heya. I just sent you a commit bit to Pugs; feel free to add yourself to the AUTHORS list, and see you on irc.freenode.net #perl6!