NPW 2009 Hackathon

The NPW 2009 Hackathon is well into its second day, and I've learned quite a bit about Perl 6 and more about Perl 5 than I expected.

I didn't originally intend to participate in the Hackathon, and I'm not doing much, but it's definitely worth it.

Yesterday, I stated a goal of adding to the spec a description of how complex numbers should be represented and presented, since that was apparently at least partially unclear.

This lead me into a quagmire of other things I needed to do first, and the "ooh, shiny!" phenomenon lead me astray a few times, ganged up with my general desire to have a functional working environment (Unicode strings in PODs didn't go down well with my current Latin 1-based working environment and the then-installed Perl version), as well as problems getting irssi on my side
But I did get to participate and act as distraction in an entertaining and useful discussion regarding types in Perl 6, as well as host a social dinner for those who wanted a break from the hackathon.

Today, I'm picking up where I left off, trying to form a mental picture of the spec that's good enough to add and/or change relevants bits of it.

The rest of the guys are adding code and doing other useful things. :)