This Week's Contribution to Perl 6

Some people think that contributing to Perl 6 (or any advanced programming language project, for that matter) is hard, complicated, and requires you to write scary compiler guts.

The truth is that there are plenty ways to help, and most of them are not scary at all. We, the Perl 6 developers, want to show you how. We will post a series of challenges/task, one per week. Each challenge will be mostly self-contained, and should be quite solvable for somebody with some basic Perl 6 knowledge, some of them even without any knowledge of Perl 6.

There will also be some initial tips together with each challenge, pointers to documentation if necessary, and the offer to answer all questions that might arise while working on the problem.

If you successfully complete a challenge, you'll have the chance to win some nice stuff (T-shirts for now, but we are looking for sponsors for more). If you contribute a patch for Rakudo, and your patch gets applied, your name will appear in the next release announcement - fame and eternal glory are certain.

Sponsors:

• 2 T-shirts (Rakudo or Perl 6) from moritz
• T-shirts + shipping for up to $100 courtesy of The Perl Foundation.

<update>: The lottery has been done, and the winners will receive their t-shirts soon. For future challenges, you have to be motivated on your own :-).

Challenges

• Week 1 - a website for proto. Status: four submissions , website live, challenge closed.
• Week 2 - fix up a test. Status: Fix submitted, challenge closed.
• Week 3 - MAIN sub. Status: two submissions so far. If you want to help out, please improve one of them instead of writing your own from scratch.
• Week 4: implement :samecase option for string substitution. Status: We have a working patch and some tests;; more tests are always welcome.
• Week 5: implement Str.trans. Status: 3 submissions, if you want to work on it, please consider working on one of the existing submissions.
• Week 6: Improve book markup. Status: two submissions, challenge closed.
• Week 7: try.rakudo.org. Status: One submission in the git repository, improvements and further implementations are always welcome.
• Week 8: implement $*ARGFILES. Status: two submissions, challenge closed.
• Week 9: implement weighted hash pick. Status: closed
• Week 10: implement space pattern preservation. Status: closed
• 11: improve error messages for hyper operators. Status: closed