Where we are now - an update

(This is an update on this blog series, not on Perl 6 in general).

After publishing ten blog posts, not counting the intro, I think it's time for a status update and some numbers.

Technical stuff - sorting

First of all I had more technical difficulties than expected. I made some stupid typos and other mistakes, and when I corrected those, the timestamps of the source files got updated. Now blosxom, the blog engine that runs this blog, sorts them at the very beginning. After a few days the posts seemd randomly ordered, so I decided to order them chronologically, and I'll later try to find a way to display the correct date, even after a small update.

Acknowledgements and Numbers

This was both necessary and possible because of the many people who reported errors. Thanks to you all, and thanks to all my trustry readers. This blog has about 500 visitors per day, nearly all of them following this blog. After publishing on use.perl.org and being recommended by perlbuzz.com I had a day with about 1200 visitors. My record so far ;-).

Google says it knows about 59 subscribers to the RSS feed, and more than 55% of all visitors use Firefox, less than 12% use Internet Explorer.

I never imagined to reach such a broad audience with such a special topic.

The Future

The next topic is not very exicting, but good to know anyway: how some operators changed from perl 5 to 6.

After that it gets really interesting: I'll write about lazy lists, and then custom operators, one of the coolest features of Perl 6 in my humble opinion.

Further topics:

• The MAIN sub - why you won't need Getopt::Long in most cases
• Twigils (not much code, but a bit of background)
• Enums and Mixins (why you can write $0 but True
• Unicode - in preparation; partly the syntax isn't specced yet :/
• Scoping - in preparation; how it avoids some pitfalls of perl 5

After that I'm really running out of ideas what to write; I could digress from the current path of following the specs and give an overview of the current compilers, their strengths, weaknesses and progress.

Another possible digression would be the introduction to November, a Perl 6 wiki, and so far the only real program that runs on Rakudo. I contributed the grammar for a HTML::Template-like templating system, and I could write a bit about its development.

If there's more interest I could also revisit some earlier topics, and write more about them; for example there's a lot to say about rules or about object orientation.

I want to leave that choice mostly to you, to the readers: what would you like to read about? After working on Perl 6 for more than a year I have seem to lost a sense for what's normal and what's exciting, which is why I need your feedback.