Ballistic Programming as a Bootstrap

30 minutes

Any

English 

Larry Wall once described programming as a ballistic process -- we aim for a target, run our attempt, see where and how we missed, adjust our aim, run again, ad nauseam until we hit the target. As an example, the Perl 6 module called Terminal::Print now has the capability to handle async printing -- and it only took three full rewrites to get there! What began with a one-liner to print falling snow on your command line (perfected by Larry, though he's never shared how many aims it took to get there) is now a 'fully operational' solution for all of your fundamental terminal display needs. Please join me as I walk you through the ballistics behind Terminal::Print and share the hardest fought lessons I learned as I inadvertently bootstrapped myself into knowing some Perl 6.