Fri, 17 Oct 2008

Where we are now - an update


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(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 exiting, 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 list, 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 exicting, which is why I need your feedback.

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xiaoyafeng wrote


my choices: Macros, IO

David Garamond wrote


There are so much to learn about Perl 6, even if one has spent years coding in Perl5. So, any insightful posts are welcome. Thank you for doing this! But my favorite topics would be rules, golfing with p6, and the new/cool operators.

andy wrote


regex's please. Do you have to write rules? Can you still do: if (/\d+(\w+)/) { print "$1\n"; } I do lot of text file transforms (import/export), so I do lot of: while () { if (/.*?(\d\d-\d\d)/) .... } etc I also use csv_xs a lot (a LOT!), and a lot of DBI. thanks for the blogs

[FunkyMonk] wrote

Great work so far, [moritz]
I've really enjoyed what you've written so far, and I'm sure I'll enjoy the rest just as much. As for future articles, I'd like to see something on the Perl 6 alikes on the CPAN. Moose is the obvious one, but world+dog has already written about it, but what about the others? Also, there's nothing to stop you from expanding those articles you've already written. I've found all of you're articles sufficient to cover the material, except rules & objects. I'm sure there's more you could write them. I would like to an article (or 2 or 3) on the state of play of the various Perl 6 implementations, as you suggested. Thanks for taking the time to write these blogs.

Dan Kuck wrote


This is just the kind of blog I needed to get me pumped about using Perl 6 instead of grumbling. Keep it up. And yes we'd like to read more about rules and object orientation. Especially if there's any weird syntax.

Moritz wrote

Ok, Regexes and Objects then
It's first regexes then, and later a bit more about objects orientation. Then... we'll see, probably some of what [FunkyMonk] suggested. Thanks for the feedback.

Vincent wrote


Thanks a lot for your work, I've just enjoyed the reading of the whole thing till there. Perl culture of documentation is just amazingly so much accurate, helpful and insightful than anything I've crossed so far.

David Romano wrote

Sorting Posts
I had an issue with blosxom re-ordering posts, too. What I did was create a wrapper around my editor when editing my blog posts to retain the original time that I modified the file: $mtime = (stat _)[9] if -e "$dir/entries/$new_file"; system qq(vi $dir/entries/$new_file); utime $mtime, $mtime, "$dir/entries/$new_file" if defined $mtime; Actually, before I wanted to post the entry, I had its extension as .draft, and then renamed it to .html.

SJS wrote

On Sorting Posts
When it comes to re-ordering blosxom posts, touch is your friend. Four statements suffice, with three commands:

touch -r file_to_edit temporary_file ; $EDITOR file_to_edit ; touch -r temporary_file file_to_edit ; rm temporary_file

I have this wrapped in a shell script, as using perl seems like overkill for this. It is, however, clever.

xiaoyafeng wrote


I've been reading your blog for a while. It's very nice definitely. for new articles, I'd like to see more things about perl6 type. The before one you've written is too short to satisfy my thirst. I want to see more examples for value type, implementation type, adverb.....
Thanks!

David Romano wrote

On Sorting Posts
SJS: I didn't know about using touch's -r option. Thanks :-)

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