use Perl

It's been a month since I first started Pugs. In this month, we have had 9 releases, 373 commits, an Apocryphon, and most importantly, a team of 16 committers, even more contributors, and many intelligent discussions on #perl6, p6c, p6l, PerlMonks, as well as many other places. I'd like to thank all of you for building this new ship with me. Also, much kudos for the design team, for continuing this extremely difficult and often thankless task.

On February 4th, in a private mail to Damian, I said this:

I'd also like to thank you and other people in the design team, for bringing the power of Oz and Curry to the masses, in such a nice, pleasant, humble package. I did not capture the beauty of Perl6 until I started implement it, and now I hope I had started sooner.

Indeed, as each day of Pugs hacking passes, I became more and more delighted by the wonderful design of Perl 6. Although Pugs (and Perl 6 itself) still has many rough edges, they will pass away gradually, and the imaginary timeline will one day become real.

Today saw a large number of commits. A particular highlight is that, with help from SubEthaEdit, I have collaborated with Ingy to create a Kwid lexer, parser, AST, and compiler (to HTML), all in one hour. In a few days, Kwid will probably become the first haskell-based extension module, which may be dynamically loaded via a DynaLoader-like mechanism. That will instantly give us a wealth of libraries, including many GUI toolkits like OpenGL, Gtk and WxWindows, which will make writing Real World application in Pugs all the easier. Other notable commits include:

• SyntaxNinja's massive -Wall cleanup landed; Pugs is now using a more maintainable and idiomatic Haskell style.
• The tireless Stevan added tests for new features in 6.0.9, including ref(), magicals, and more.
• metaperl has started documenting the Haskell source files, starting from the Junction engine. Yay!
• duff has committed a new example, the hanoi tower solver.

Oh, and tonight I was moved to a better room with high-speed internet access, so I can finally install FreeBSD. Hopefully it will increase my productivity, just in time for recruiting more Pugs hackers in the 48-hours-nonstop CodeFest Asia, which will start in 5 hours from now. See you tomorrow!