[Neworleans-pm] Perl 6?

[James E Keenan]

On Oct 28, 2008, at 3:00 PM, neworleans-pm-request at pm.org wrote:

>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2008 08:22:58 -0500
> From: "B. Estrade" <estrabd at mailcan.com>
> Subject: [Neworleans-pm] Perl 6?
> To: New Orleans Perl Mongers <neworleans-pm at pm.org>
>
> Has anyone been following or playing with Perl 6/Parrot? I've been  
> lurking on the lists since the early days, and have gone through  
> fits where I contribute automated smoke tests, but that is about it.
>
>

I've been participating in the Parrot project since November 2006  
(about 8 months after my last visit to NOLA).  I fell into it by  
accident while attending a Perl hackathon in Chicago that year and  
running out of other things to do.  Since I have only elementary C  
skills and no formal background in compilers or virtual machines, I  
can't claim to have worked on the essential parts of Parrot.  But I  
have become a de factor maintainer of the Perl 5 code used in the  
'configure' and 'build' stages of Parrot build.  I spoke on those  
efforts at YAPC::NA::2007 in Houston (http://thenceforward.net/perl/ 
yapc/YAPC-NA-2007/cft.tgz) and at YAPC in Chicago this year I led a  
'Parrot/Rakudo' build fest, the object of which was to have people  
build and compile Parrot on their laptops (or remote machines) and  
then have them build and compile Rakudo -- the Perl 6 implementation  
on Parrot -- just enough to get to "Hello world" in Perl 6.

I have not followed the Perl 6 language discussions at all, and I  
don't have enough tuits to follow Rakudo's ongoing development.   
However, in our local Perl user group, Perl Seminar NY, we are  
planning to have short, bimonthly sessions organized around the theme  
of "Perl 5 to Perl 6," the focus of which will be to let people see  
what features of Perl 6 are currently available in the Rakudo  
implementation and how they differ from Perl 5.

Perhaps we could get together and discuss this when I'm in New  
Orleans in a few weeks.  And the lead Rakudo developer is Patrick  
Michaud, who lives outside Dallas which, in the larger scheme of  
things, is not that far from your town.

Jim Keenan

BTW:  Did anyone bother to archive the New Orleans perlmongers wiki  
before the site lapsed?