Quo Vadis Perl?

The last two days we had a gathering in town named Perl (yes, a place with that name exists). It's a lovely little town next to the borders to France and Luxembourg, and our meeting was titled "Perl Reunification Summit".

Sadly I only managed to arrive in Perl on Friday late in the night, so I missed the first day. Still it was totally worth it.

We tried to answer the question of how to make the Perl 5 and the Perl 6 community converge on a social level. While we haven't found the one true answer to that, we did find that discussing the future together, both on a technical and on a social level, already brought us closer together.

It was quite a touching moment when Merijn "Tux" Brand explained that he was skeptic of Perl 6 before the summit, and now sees it as the future.

We also concluded that copying API design is a good way to converge on a technical level. For example Perl 6's IO subsystem is in desperate need of a cohesive design. However none of the Perl 6 specification and the Rakudo development team has much experience in that area, and copying from successful Perl 5 modules is a viable approach here. Path::Class and IO::All (excluding the crazy parts) were mentioned as targets worth looking at.

There is now also an IRC channel to continue our discussions -- join #p6p5 on irc.perl.org if you are interested.

We also discussed ways to bring parallel programming to both perls. I missed most of the discussion, but did hear that one approach is to make easier to send other processes some serialized objects, and thus distribute work among several cores.

Patrick Michaud gave a short ad-hoc presentation on implicit parallelism in Perl 6. There are several constructs where the language allows parallel execution, for example for Hyper operators, junctions and feeds (think of feeds as UNIX pipes, but ones that allow passing of objects and not just strings). Rakudo doesn't implement any of them in parallel right now, because the Parrot Virtual Machine does not provide the necessary primitives yet.

Besides the "official" program, everybody used the time in meat space to discuss their favorite projects with everybody else. For example I took some time to discuss the future of doc.perl6.org with Patrick and Gabor Szabgab, and the relation to perl6maven with the latter. The Rakudo team (which was nearly completely present) also discussed several topics, and I was happy to talk about the relation between Rakudo and Parrot with Reini Urban.

Prior to the summit my expectations were quite vague. That's why it's hard for me to tell if we achieved what we and the organizers wanted. Time will tell, and we want to summarize the result in six to nine months. But I am certain that many participants have changed some of their views in positive ways, and left the summit with a warm, fuzzy feeling.

I am very grateful to have been invited to such a meeting, and enjoyed it greatly. Our host and organizers, Liz and Wendy, took care of all of our needs -- travel, food, drinks, space, wifi, accommodation, more food, entertainment, food for thought, you name it. Thank you very much!

Update: Follow the #p6p5 hash tag on twitter if you want to read more, I'm sure other participants will blog too.

Other blogs posts on this topic: PRS2012 – Perl5-Perl6 Reunification Summit by mdk and post-yapc by theorbtwo