Learning Perl 6

Preface

Welcome to the first edition of Learning Perl 6, a book title that sounds similar to others you may have read and I may have written. This one, however, is my first book about the language called “Perl 6.” I know the name is a bit confusing; I’m not in charge of that part. I’m just the book writer.

Okay, I can see you’re not satisfied with that.

Here’s the short answer you probably want: if you need to learn Perl because someone made that choice for you, you’re probably looking for my other book, Learning Perl, that covers the widely used Perl 5. That’s the stable ol’ workhorse that’s been around virtually forever. This one is about the new language that’s still growing up and isn’t in wide use yet.

Here’s the longer answer for those of you who are still reading. You either know that you want Perl 6 or you don’t really care which one you get as long as you learn a new language.

The Backstory of Perl 6

At the Perl Conference in 2000, a group of Perl people got together in a hotel conference room in Monterey, California. It was a Tuesday. Later that day the Perl 5 Porters would meet to talk about the immediate future of Perl. Chip Salzenberg had organized this mostly secret pre-meeting to come up with some ideas. Somehow he dragged me into the pre-meeting.

We started chatting about the roadblocks Perl 5 was facing at the time: the developers hated each other, the source code was intractable, and Perl was losing the popularity contest.

Chip had tried a complete rewrite of Perl in ...