The Linux Ninja

Patrick Michaud posted a journal entry on his use Perl; page that says

We will make an “official”, intermediate, useful and usable release of Perl 6 (an appropriate subset) by Spring 2010.

in reference to the Rakudo implementation of Perl6 on Parrot. This is definitely exciting news for all Perl programmers out there. While this is only intended to be an intermediate release and the feature set is still being ironed out, I’m definitely excited by this milestone release of Perl 6. I first heard Larry Wall talk about Perl6 during his keynote at the USENIX LISA conference in 2002. I was fascinated by many of the new features and couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Over the years the lack of usable Perl6 implementations being included by different distros has cooled my excitement. I messed around with a few of the different implementations (such as Pugs) and parrot here and there, but never took it too seriously because things were changing in them so quickly.

I still use Perl for alot of the scripts I write, but I have also begun implementing some of my scripts in Python and more recently even a few in Ruby (due to its easy extension of base classes, not due to the speed ). This is definitely exciting news and I hope to hear plans for integration by the major Linux distros soon so I can start taking advantage of all the awesome new features.

Further Perl6 Reading:

• Larry Wall’s Perl6 Apocalypses
• Perl 6 FAQ