use Perl

This weekend marks the end of a quite astonishing era. The Pugs repo, that hosted all the amazing Perl 6 activity, is no more. At its height, this repository had 242 committers! I just checked.

It is with a peevish exultation of spirit that I announce on behalf of the Yapsi development team the September 2010 release of Yapsi -- soon to be a major motion picture -- a Perl 6 compiler written in Perl 6.

my $n = 10;
my @pascal := do [1], -> @p { [0,@p Z+ @p,0] } ... *;
my $m = @pascal[$n - 1].perl.chars;
say (my $r = $_.perl).fmt("%{($m + $r.chars) div 2}s") for @pascal[^$n];

Produces this:

                 [1]
                [1, 1]
              [1, 2, 1]
             [1, 3, 3, 1]
           [1, 4, 6, 4, 1]
         [1, 5, 10, 10, 5, 1]
       [1, 6, 15, 20, 15, 6, 1]
     [1, 7, 21, 35, 35, 21, 7, 1]
   [1, 8, 28, 56, 70, 56, 28, 8, 1]
[1, 9, 36, 84, 126, 126, 84, 36, 9, 1]

Aye. I considered both forms, and went with the do form.

When binding has list precedence, neither parentheses nor the do will be needed.

Fixed, thanks.

So, I wrote a program to generate Pascal's triangle. The first ten rows of the triangle, at least. It only used simple features of Perl 6, such as scalars, nested arrays, and for loops.

my $ELEMENTS = 10;
my @pascal = [1];

for 1 .. $ELEMENTS - 1 {
    my @last = @pascal[ * - 1 ].list;

(This post isn't very punny. For those of you who need puns to survive, try to figure out why jnthn++ named the IRC logs "the hottest footwear" recently. The answer, as with all good puns, is highly unsatisfying.)

My quest for a Perl 6 implementation takes me ever deeper into the esoterics of lexpads, runtimes, and a far-more-than-everything-you-needed-to-know mindset. Today some random firings in my brain turned into the following conversation on #perl6.

I was reproached by my colleague because of the lack of "no cake"-style jokes in this last grant update. So what can I do to amend the situation? Firstly, let me concede that the below blog post is almost tear-inducingly boring. Secondly, let me remind you that when accosted by boring material such as that in this post, the most important thing to have is a positive outlook on life. Thank you.

Let's look at a week two years ago in the perl6 RT queue. Who submitted bugs?

Moritz
Moritz
Moritz
Moritz
Yaakov
Yaakov
Carl
Moritz
Moritz
Ron
Charlie
Carl
Carl
Carl
Carl
Carl


Dang! I should have voted that too. :)

Blood has been boiling, and I'm glad we've collectively found ways to make it not boil anymore. An outright intra-Perl tribal war -- and we seem to have turned away from that path by now -- would have been wasteful, probably ugly, and doubtless sad.

As a fairly entrenched Sixer, I might have a slightly warped perspective on the "different languages" thing. As long as it felt like a criticism and a threat of community fracturing, I was less inclined to agree. Also, as long as the two statements "Perl 6 isn't Perl 5" and "Perl 6 isn't Perl" were equivalent in the minds of people, it was difficult for me as a Sixer to agree.

Now both of these things have changed. The community didn't fracture, it just shifted into people doing Serious Production stuff and people Optimizing for Fun (and those doing both). It's getting increasingly accepted that "Perl" encompasses both Perl 5 and Perl 6, but isn't equivalent to either of them. And that's probably why it's easier for me to say today that Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different.

Right. Just saying that there's a qualitative distinction between "Perl 6 inspired modern Perl" and "Perl 6 was a precondition for modern Perl."

I bet that assertion would meet anything from full agreement to full disagreement among Perl 5 people. Doesn't say much about its truth content, of course.

But I wouldn't put it past the Perl 5 people to invent things like Moose and the testing culture even without Perl 6 doing experiments at the front lines. Maybe in a hypothetical parallel universe where Perl 6 never existed, they'd have chosen to be inspired by the good parts of Haskell or Python or Ruby (or other languages with good parts) instead.

Today at the YAPC::EU keynote, the inimitable Larry Wall, accompanied by his guardian angel and his guardian devil, made a poll asking which ones in the audience believed Perl 5 and Perl 6 are the same language, and which ones believed they are two different languages.