doc.perl6.org: some stats, future directions

In June 2012 I started the perl6/doc repository with the intent to collect/write API documentation for Perl 6 built-in types and routines. Not long afterwards, the website doc.perl6.org was born, generated from the aforementioned repository.

About 2.5 years later, the repository has seen more than one thousand commits from more than 40 contributors, 14 of which contributed ten patches or more. The documentation encompasses about 550 routines in 195 types, with 15 documents for other things than built-in types (for example an introduction to regexes, descriptions of how variables work).

In terms of subjective experience, I observed an increase in the number of questions on our IRC channel and otherwise that could be answered by pointing to the appropriate pages of doc.perl6.org, or augmenting the answer with a statement like "for more info, see ..."

While it's far from perfect, I think both the numbers and the experience is very encouraging, and I'd like to thank everybody who helped make that happen, often by contributing skills I'm not good at: front-end design, good English and gentle encouragement.

Plans for the Future

Being a community-driven project, I can't plan anybody else's time on it, so these are my own plans for the future of doc.perl6.org.

Infrastructural improvements

There are several unsolved problems with the web interface, with how we store our documents, and how information can be found. I plan to address them slowly but steadily.

• The search is too much centered around types and routines, searching for variables, syntactic constructs and keywords isn't easily possible. I want it to find many more things than right now.
• Currently we store the docs for each type in a separate file called Type.pod. Which will break when we start to document native types, which being with lower case letters. Having int.pod and Int.pod is completely unworkable on case-insensitive or case-preserving file system. I want to come up with a solution for that, though I don't yet know what it will look like.
• doc.perl6.org is served from static pages, which leads to some problems with file names conflicting with UNIX conventions. You can't name a file infix:</>.html, and files with two consecutive dots in their names are also weird. So in the long run, we'll have to switch to some kind of dynamic URL dispatching, or a name escaping scheme that is capable of handling all of Perl 6's syntax.
• Things like the list of methods and what they coerce to in class Cool don't show up in derived types; either the tooling needs to be improved for that, or they need to be rewritten to use the usual one-heading-per-method approach.

Content

Of course my plan is to improve coverage of the built-in types and routines, and add more examples. In addition, I want to improve and expand on the language documentation (for example syntax, OO, regexes, MOP), ideally documenting every Perl 6 feature.

Once the language features are covered in sufficient breadth and depth (though I won't wait for 100% coverage), I want to add three tutorial tracks:

• A track for beginners
• A quick-start for programmers from other languages
• A series of intermediate to advanced guides covering topics such as parsing, how to structure a bigger application, the responsible use of meta programming, or reactive programming.

Of course I won't be able to do that all on my own, so I hope to convince my fellow and future contributors that those are good ideas.

Time to stop rambling about the future, and off to writing some docs, this is yours truly signing off.