Recently, I have started developing a Bailador application. This is the Dancer equivalent in Perl6 that seems to have the majority mindshare. I have been motivated by the Perl6 talks at the recent Perl Conference in Amsterdam to try my hand at the latest version of the perl programming language.
That said, Perl6 is certainly not a revision of Perl5, rather a new language. I quite like the idea floating around to refer to it as Rakudo as new languages are all the rage right now. 🙂
Leading on from this I discovered the “Perl6 Bug Squashathon” and decided whilst I had some freetime this Saturday to give it a go. So I logged into IRC and joined the #perl6 channel and started looking at the repo that is being focussed on this weekend. That being the documentation repository.
It was great to dig into a new repo and take a look and see what I can discover. I did manage a couple of commits made and accepted too.
Playing with Bailador has been interesting, it really highlights for me that knowing Perl5 is not a great qualification and potentially is a handicap when trying to write Perl6 aka Rakudo. Most of my errors were me doing things in a Perl5 way. Everything from sigils onwards really.
This week coming I think I will be able to get my Bailador web app online, I have not worked my way through hosting a Perl6 app yet. But am hoping it’s not so hard. I may even attempt doing it as a dockerised app… we shall see. More than likely I will got for MVP, and manually install and run it on a server to start with.
My Bailador application is related to Judo, which being Japanese uses lots of unicode characters, so being able to use a language like Rakudo (Perl6) that works so well with unicode characters. Being able to use “背負投” for example as a key is really helpful.
The maturity of the ecosystem of modules around Rakudo (Perl6) does need work, but actively writing something in Perl6/Rakudo does mean I am getting involved in finding and helping fix bugs in the code and documentation.
You could argue there is a lack of modules in Perl6, but equally the smaller number of modules is, for me at least, somewhat of a positive as their are not a million options for everything. The “Citation” system I hope will be extended further and further and help prevent the problem CPAN and NPM suffer from in that you often have no clue what is the right module to choose.
Which brings me to the community…
So far it has been exceptionally friendly and responsive. The #perl6 irc channel has been really great and I’ve had nothing but good interactions with developers in the Perl6 world. This makes me happy and very positive towards the Perl6 programming language.
There will be another “squashathon” next month and I should be at home for that one, so hoping I have a better opportunity to get involved.
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