Are you good enough for Perl 6?
From AJS.COM
Are you good enough for Perl 6? It's a pretty over-the-top question, but I mean it. One of the biggest problems that I think the Perl 6 development has right now is that there are very few people in the world who really understand language design, compilation, code generation, and other related issues deeply enough to truly contribute to the writing of the Perl 6 intnerals, and several of them are already involved.
On many open source projects, developers swarm in as the project reaches a critical threshold of "realness", but Perl 6 has gone through several phases of such increases in developer muscle, and invariably most of these developers wander away, scratching their heads at the breadth and depth of the the project, which seeks to introduce all of these concepts to Perl:
- Traits
- Continuations
- A full parser toolset built into the language
- Duck typing
- Generic programming
- Lazy evaluation at all levels
- Inter-language operability
- True Lisp-like macros
- Control over the Perl 6 parser at compile- and run-time
- Multi-method dispatch
To say that this is a Herculean task is probably in the right ballpark, if not an understatement.
Meanwhile, the Parrot virtual machine
seeks to provide the infrastructure on top of which all this will be possible.
So, I ask again: are you good enough for Perl 6? If so, and you enjoy a nearly impossible challenge, I suggest you visit the Perl 6 development site, the Parrot development site, and the Pugs development site. Download the code and play around with it. If you find yourself saying, "this is just like my last three projects," boy have we got a job for you ;-)
