[VPM] some useful info/dl urls about Perl 6

Darren Duncan darren at DarrenDuncan.net
Wed Aug 2 00:17:25 PDT 2006


All,

This email is a follow-up to the second "Recreational Computer 
Science Society" ( http://groups.google.com/group/reccompsci/ ) 
meeting that took place 6pm tonight at UVIC's ECS 660.

At the meeting, in response to the several-places-heard criticism 
that Perl 6 is never coming out (ala Duke Nukem Forever), I responded 
that things are in fact moving quickly now, catalyzed by the start of 
the Pugs project 1.5 years ago, with a lot of the language now 
implemented and useable today, and the language design now winding 
into corner cases, and over a hundred active developers.

Responding to a request at the meeting, following are some good and 
current links where you can read about and download Perl 6.  It isn't 
exhaustive, but it may be all you really need for now.

-----------

DOCUMENTATION:

1. http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/synopsis.html - the htmlized 
official language spec in progress; 
http://svn.perl.org/perl6/doc/trunk/design/syn/ is the 
slightly-ahead-by-a-few-hours original pod version

2. http://www.samag.com/documents/s=10093/sam0609j/ - a short 
tutorial like example set on using Pugs with various Perl 6 code 
examples that work now

3. http://pugs.blogs.com/ - frequently updated blog of Audrey Tang, 
the lead developer of Pugs (the currently most complete Perl 6 
implementation) which best illustrates latest developments

4. http://pugscode.org/ - a central info site for Pugs, but 
infrequently updated

5. http://parrotcode.org/ - a central info site for Parrot, a virtual 
machine for multiple languages, the long term main Perl 6 
implementation / target

IMPLEMENTATIONS:

1. http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl6-Pugs/ - distributions of Pugs, 
featuring its most complete Haskell implementation (requires the free 
GHC), plus copies of related projects that are not Parrot, such as 
the on-Javascript implementation (run Perl 6 in your web browser) ... 
latest is Pugs 6.2.12, subsequent is 6.28.0

2. http://rt.openfoundry.org/Foundry/Project/?Queue=270 - web site 
for Pugs' Subversion repository ... ignore the release versions/dates 
mentioned ... but notice the large committer list

3. http://search.cpan.org/dist/v6-alpha/ - distributions of v6.pm, a 
pure Perl 5 implementation letting you use Perl 6 without GHC or 
Parrot ... this version will probably be used in production first, by 
me anyway ... see also http://search.cpan.org/dist/Moose/ , one of 
its main dependencies that is independently useful, and being used in 
production later this very month

4. http://search.cpan.org/dist/parrot/ - distributions of Parrot 
(just requires a C compiler, mainly) ... latest is Parrot 0.4.5

5. There also exist Win32 binaries of the above to help Windows 
people.  A quick search showed http://www.pxperl.com/ for example, 
but that is a year out of date, and newer alternatives probably exist.

FORUMS:

1. IRC channel #perl6 on chat.freenode.net port 6667 - where most 
Pugs development discussion happens, and also some Perl 6 design 
discussion and users discussion ... see also 
http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/perl6 , which is a web 
archive of that channel, paginated by day

2. Email list perl6-users at perl.org - recently created as a forum more 
for people using Perl 6 rather than for its development talk ... this 
is a good place besides #perl6 to ask your questions ... see also 
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users , a web archive of 
that list

3. Email list perl6-language at perl.org - main list for discussing Perl 
6 design ... see also 
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.language , a web archive of 
that list

-----------

Okay, I may pull together an improved list later, but hopefully you 
should be able to see a good idea of the current state of things 
through those links.

P.S.  FYI, I am personally involved in the Pugs project for nearly 
its whole existence, mainly by writing non-trivial code in Perl 6, 
and regularly post to #perl6 and perl6-language.  I currently 
anticipate using Perl 6 in production myself by Christmas of THIS 
year, thanks partly to v6.pm which lowers the barrier to installation 
and integration with legacy Perl 5 code.

Good day. -- Darren Duncan


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