Perl 6 hackathon

Update: Rakudu Release #22 has been named after us!
blog | official announcment

Our (TO.pm) Perl 6 Hackathon was last Saturday. I had a blast, waking up early and spending Saturday morning tackling a new challenge. Aran & ValueClick were wonderful hosts! Thank you! In theory, our plan was to make a simple DB back aggregation website to test the state of the art in perl6 land. My goal was to show up and hack away, and see what there was to see.

We set up ourselves on a communal account on a shared host. I set up a common screen session which made it easy and fun to follow each others work. There may be new tools for communal editing (subethaedit and the like), but screen has a certain beauty and simplicity that is perfect for this "four laptops in a room" coding style. I also made a local git repository to snapshot our process. The local repo is complete, but I had problems pushing it to github. I'll get that working soon and push it up.

Before the meet-up, Todd had made gains getting sqlite3 to work with perl6 + rakudu. (Honestly I was mostly lost by his birdseed code but it is definitely neat). I spent much of Saturday providing pairing with him to provide assistance getting his stuff working in our shared environment. Frustrating that updates to rakudu knocked out his working code, but he has since moved on to get it working another way.

As you know, Mitch and I were working on the cyanide system. Well, earlier today it ate itself. But, these little set-backs are just what we need to take a giant step forward. Right, Kent? Needless to say, I was a little despondent about the melt down, but then, in the midst of my preparations for hari kiri, it came to me. It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix. Yes, it's an excimer frozen in its excited state.
--Real Genius

I didn't actually write anything in perl6 during the hackathon. I did get to read and edit some PIR (parrot code). I read the scripts that Aran and Shawn put together. I think Aran's "game" is even still live on http://sponge-six.thousand-oaks-perl.org. Notice the empty button on the cave page, that's the result of the body of a for loop getting executed, even though the array is empty. Bug? Feature? Confusion?

I had a great time. I enjoyed hacking together a working environment and smoothing rough edges, that plays well to my skills. I hope to do something similar in the future, "social coding" is fun! Give it a try. Get involved! Your Language and Your World are what you make them!