Welcome to the Perl 6 Workspace

• This is the home page for Perl 6.
• There is a Parrot workspace as well.
• Please feel free to add or modify pages — even this one — as you see fit. That's the idea of a Workspace. So please contribute links and information!

What is Perl 6?

What is Perl 6? Perl 6 is an extensively refactored, super-modernized, and ultra-supercharged derivative of Perl 5. Simple things will still be simple to do, but you'll have enormously more "programming leverage" available for tackling challenging tasks. Chromatic has written a good introductory article on why Perl 6 is needed, and what it is. Also see Juerd's Refuting Perl6 Myths. (A slight correction to Juerd's slides: it is Perl 5.10 that will have many Perl 6 features you can start using. These will be in feature.pm which is currently part of the Perl 5.9 developer branch.)

See The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List.

Other answers:

• Larry Wall (2006): Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that.
• Damian Conway (2003): The Perl 6 design process is about keeping what works in Perl 5, fixing what doesn't, and adding what's missing. That means there will be a few fundamental changes to the language, a large number of extensions to existing features, and a handful of completely new ideas. These modifications, enhancements, and innovations will work together to make the future Perl even more insanely great -- without, we hope, making it even more greatly insane.
• Perl 6 is still under construction. So don't make critical plans that depend on it just yet. However, please see other sections below about intermediate Perl 6-related solutions you can use now (or soon, as in Perl 5.10, which will feature several Perl 6 features).
• Crazy (in a good way)
• Perl 5 : Swiss Army Chain Saw == Perl 6 : Swiss Army T-X Terminator (on the side of humans in this case)
• ....

What are people doing with Perl 6?

• PITA - The Perl Image Testing Architecture (http://ali.as/pita/).
• Darren Duncan's work on a Perl 6 Relation type (as in relational algebra and data structures).
• ....

General Perl 6 News

• Planet Perl 6 blog aggregrator (The best general news source for Perl 6. It would be very helpful if others selectively copied the most useful information from this great resource into appropriate sections of this wiki.)
• Planet Parrot blog aggregator

Perl 6 Mailing Lists

• perl.perl6.users mail list archives
• ....

You can access the mailing lists in several ways (we use perl.perl6.users as an example below, make appropriate substitutions for other cases) :

• Subscribe by emailing perl6-users-subscribe@perl.org.
• Access the news feed by pointing your news reader to: <news://nntp.perl.org/perl.perl6.users>. Need a decent Windows newsreader? Mozilla's Thunderbird works for me.
• We're also available at Google Groups perl.perl6.users.
• Subject lines of mailing list posts with link to each post can be found in our archive.
• There is also a RSS feed

General Perl 6 Information

• Official Perl 6 Documentation Page (Which means, documentation that is officially bundled with Perl 6 builds.) (on feather, a Perl 6 development server)
• Perl6 Community Development Server (on feather, a Perl 6 development server)
• Perl's Official Home Page (at perl.org)
• Perl 6 Synopses (This is the official Perl 6 specification, which supersedes the apocalypses and exegeses, and which is bundled with Perl 6 builds. The rapidly growing Perl 6 test base is another {very important, complementary, and emerging} part of the Perl 6 specification as well.)
• Perl 6 Development Info. (at perl.org)
• #perl6 IRC logs (Where many Perl 6 compiler and module developers hang out; Larry Wall is 'TimToady'.)
• Another Perl 6 Wiki (For a long time, the Perl 6 Wiki at perl.net.au was the best general introduction to Perl 6, and a great point of departure to other Perl 6 resources around the web.)
• Perl 6 Users FAQ (The initial large batch of text and links on this Wiki originally came from this FAQ on the perl.net.au Perl 6 Wiki. The folks there deserve much thanks for "Wikifying" my original ugly ASCII Perl 6 Users FAQ, which was developed at the inaguration of perl.perl6.users.)

Wiki 101

• If you'd like an introductory tour of the Socialtext Workspace, start here.
• Visit Recent Changes every once in a while to see what's new, and see Socialtext Documentation for tips to use this Workspace.
• Make links by putting words or phrases in square brackets. Click on Edit This Page to see some examples.