[VPM] March 15th meeting subject

[Darren Duncan]

We should start planning for the March meeting now, since its only a week away.

Last month I suggested that I could talk more about my database stuff 
this month.

However, in the last day or so I came up with something different 
that may be more interesting in the short term.

I have since 2-3 days ago signed on to the Pugs project semi full 
time and can relate some of the experiences of doing this at the 
meeting.

For those of you out of the loop, Pugs is a Perl 6 implementation 
written in Haskell.  While I don't know any Haskell, this is still a 
great opportunity to write Perl 6 code that can actually be executed 
on something.  Pugs is intended to help flesh out edge cases in the 
Perl 6 spec and comes in advance of anything working on Parrot.

My main role right now is writing a bunch of Perl 6 code that can be 
done for integration testing, which is using a variety of language 
features together.  I have started translating my Perl 5 modules into 
Perl 6, along with their tests.  In doing so, we can get an idea just 
how everything would be done in Perl 6 for work that actually does 
something useful, and isn't just a "sample".

I have already translated my Locale::KeyedText module, whose Perl 6 
form you can see in the Pugs version control.  Or wait a few days for 
the next weekly CPAN upload.  I couldn't actually execute it yet, 
because Pugs is missing some features that it needs, but the fact 
that I coded this in advance can help them when adding support for 
said features to Pugs.  My code probably has errors in it.

One thing I can do in the March meeting is have 2 print outs of the 
module, showing the Perl 5 and Perl 6 versions side by side.  I can 
also relate some interesting Perl 6 language features that I recently 
discovered.

At least for now, my role with the development of Perl 6 seems to be 
important, as no one else as tried to tackle the kind of things I'm 
doing now.  As the saying goes, if you want to be noticed, get in 
early.

I could also talk about my database stuff at the March meeting.  Or 
others of you can talk about subjects you're interested in.

Either way, I think we have enough for a March meeting, so we 
shouldn't have to cancel it sans the absense of a lot of people.

-- Darren Duncan

P.S. If you're interested in front line Perl stuff, read Autrijus' journal:
http://use.perl.org/~autrijus/journal/
He's the head of this Pugs endeavour, which no one was expecting.

P.P.S. Perl 6 is quite exciting.  Lots of good new useful stuff in there.