YAPC::Europe 2013 “Future Perl”

Week minus 45. Future 5 vs. Future 6

07/10/12 17:11 by Andrey Shitov (‎ash‎)

This week there were a couple of contradictory messages on our Twitter which triggered a small discussion.

Being a joke of what is more important at the conference, either talks on Perl 5 or talks on Perl 6, those two tweets contain a mixture of feelings behind them.

The major problem with Perl 6 talks is that there are many attendees to the conference who are not very interested in that version of the language. There's nothing wrong with this opinion, and we respect the attendees who come to the conference to learn new things about Perl 5, and we will always support this part of the audience.

On the other hand, the development of Perl 6 itself gives not too many reasons to include many Perl 6 talks, as it did not become yet a language suitable for production systems. I think, it is clear for a few years, that there are people in Perl community who would be very happy to start using Perl 6, and would also continue with Perl 5 in their projects.

I think we also can host a one-day Perl 6 hackathon as we did in Riga. Or even a Perl 5 hackathon if there are enthusiasts for this kind of event.

Let's now just look at the Past, and see what were the talks given in the previous years, the years before the conference in Kiev named Future Perl. Note that there were lots of talks given about Parrot, not exactly on Perl 6.

2002 Damian Conway. Perl 6 Prospective Dan Sugalski. Inside Parrot

2003 Marty Pauley. ‎Perl6 ideas stolen from Japanese‎ Leopold Toetsch. ‎Parrot Overview Leopold Toetsch. ‎Of Ops and Mops - or how the code gets executed‎ Léon Brocard. ‎Little Languages in Parrot‎ Dan Sugalski. ‎The State of Parrot‎ Arthur Bergman. Ponie: Perl on New Internal Engine‎

2004 Parrot

2005 Leopold Toetsch. ‎News about Parrot‎ Christian Aperghis-Tramoni. ‎Using Parrot machine as a pedagogic platform‎

2006 Jonathan Worthington. Sorry, you're not my type Adrian Howard. Perl Eye for the Ruby Guy Leopold Tötsch. Introduction to Parrot Leopold Tötsch. Parrot Specials Allison Randal. The Parrot Compiler Tools Jonathan Worthington. Translating .Net Libraries To Parrot MarkOv & Sam Vilain. CPAN6, CPAN for Perl6

2007 Juerd Waalboer. ‎Social Perl 6 - Getting the most out of your tuits‎ Jonathan Worthington. Playing with bird guts‎ Damian Conway. ‎Perl 6 Update‎ Flavio Glock. ‎Adventures in Perl6 Wim Vanderbauwhede. ‎The 'runpugs' web terminal: Run Perl 6 now -- in your browser!‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Playing with bird guts‎ Allison Randal. Parrot Hackathon‎

2008 Nuno Carvalho. ‎Beautiful Parrot‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Rakudo: Perl 6 on Parrot‎ Paweł Murias. ‎Perl 6 is just a SMOP‎ Mark Overmeer. ‎CPAN6 Under Construction‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Object Orientation, The Perl 6 Way‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Putting Types To Work In Perl 6‎

2009 Damian Conway. Perl 6 update‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Hacking Rakudo Perl 6‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Perl 6 Roles In Depth Martin Berends. ‎Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers‎ Carl Mäsak ‎Perl 6 ♥ the Web‎

2010 Patrick Michaud. ‎Rakudo Star - A usable Perl 6 release‎ Carl Mäsak. ‎Perl 6 appetizers‎ Moritz Lenz. ‎Perl 6 and The Real World‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Perl 6 Signatures: The Full Story‎ Andrew Shitov. ‎Using text in search requests with examples in Perl 6‎ Martin Berends. ‎Perl 6 Database Interfacing Tim Bunce. ‎DBDI: A Foundation For Database Access In Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Not Quite Perl (NQP) - A lightweight Perl 6‎ Carl Mäsak. ‎Perl 6: Prince of Parsea‎

2011 Jonathan Worthington. ‎Rakudo Evolved: speed, feedback and hackability‎ Damian Conway. Developing in Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Perl 6 Lists, Arrays, and Hashes vivified: lazy, infinite, flat, slurpy, typed, bound, and LoL'd‎ Jonathan Worthington. ‎Debugging Perl 6 Grammars‎

2012 Jonathan Worthington. ‎Exceptional Perl 6‎ Patrick Michaud. ‎Perl 6 Documentation -- The Good, The Bad and the Missing‎

The year 2012 is an example of Perl 6's nature: not only it gives new features back to Perl but it also allows more space for Perl 6 talks: according to the comment left by the organisers in Frankfurt, willing to give a word for the Perl 6 speakers, they added the fourth track, where even more Perl 5 talks were placed.

Speaking of myself (not as an organiser of the conference in Kiev but as a Perl lover), I would like that Perl 6 always contains the spirit of passion, hope and future as it was in 2007:

All in all, we are very open to both Perl 5 and Perl 6 talks, both practical and theoretical, and encourage the speakers to submit their talks (as soon as we launch the website :-).