Community boost

It is now three days since the release of Rakudo Star.

Everything has met my personal expectations, except for one major thing:

There is a bunch of new people on #perl6, who are actively engaged in trying out Rakudo Star/Perl 6, in testing, submitting bug reports, patch suggestions, asking for help, providing help, helping themselves…

I really do not have anything profound to say, but I can say this:

Now we are really getting somewhere!

2009 In Perl

Repeat after me: I will not pretend to be an analyst or doomsayer, even though the end (of 2009) is nigh.

In 2009, Perl grew up a bit more, both as a language and as a community.

Language Development

Perl 5.10.1 came with a pony to those of us who fear the .0 releases.

The Perl 5.11 development tree got started, and it looks like it is rolling on rails. At this rate, we will see 5.12.0 quicker than you can say antidisestablishmentarianism.

... Perl 6 has made progress both on the specification side and in implementations -- yep, that is plural. It is sometimes confusing when naming changes under your feet, but it is acceptable while the spec is still settling.

Community

In 2009, I think I saw more openness regarding the internal conflicts in the Perl community as a whole; there were abundant admissions that we were not communicating nearly as well as we should, that there was at least a small amount of internal bickering over the present and future state of the onion -- onions, I must inject, tend to come in many shapes and flavours, and are not always the same inside -- really, which way we are going, are we having a conflict or not (yes we are -- no we are not -- huh, are we talking? -- pass the chips), and get off my lawn before I shoot or hug you.

In brief, it looks to me like 2009 was the year when the community showed renews signs of self-awareness.

But much more happened. We got a closer focus on Perl visibility, from my POV mainly owing to Matt S. Trout's lightning talk challenge from NPW 2009, plus a whole range of people working on other PR aspects for ourselves. And mst still keeps his hair colour. Wow.

Other Stuff

I made new friends, I learned a lot, I even got to help out a bit, and I hope that this will continue in 2010.

I hope you will too.

Happy new year!

Contributing to Perl

Inspiration is a big bother, at least when you don't have it.

I never felt that I had anything to contribute to the Perl community until the Nordic Perl Workshop this year, when I suddenly was involved in a small way.

I'm still involved in a small way, and only occasionally, but that works rather well.

In retrospect, my expectation that contributing would be a Big Deal turned out be wrong.

I don't have to solve all the problems in the world, and I don't have to solve the Big Ones, either.

It doesn't even take much of my time, and this level of contribution is one that suits many people.

Inspiration comes from the impression I have that there are many more people like me, and that all those little trickles of water we add to the pool are enough to keep the more active contributors going.

What is difficult, however, is to keep up with the Iron Man blogging challenge. I knew it would be when I got started, but I figured that there would always be something to write about without seeming too inane.

Today's post shows that I was wrong on that count. :D

Hash key sort order - a Perl 6 community sunshine story

The order of hash keys is implementation dependent and arbitrary. Unless %hash is altered in any way, successive calls to .keys, .kv, .pairs, .values, or .iterator will iterate over the elements in the same order.

S09 - Hashes

This is new. It may not actually say much, but it does say what was implicit before, so that there is little room for doubt.

So here's my little sunshine story about how easy it is to clarify a part of the spec.

In my previous post, I used an imaginary case for showing off some features of Perl 6 - some of which also are available in Perl 5.10, as mentioned by Robert 'phaylon' Sedlacek in a comment.

This wasn't the only useful comment, I think there's a bit to be learned by reading those, so please do.

But I digress from the point of this post, which is a question that was raised in another comment to last Sunday's post:

By the way, do you know where the behavior of ~%h is spec'ed? I keep getting the keys back in the same order I put them in and don't know if that is an implementation quirk or a feature.

- Chas. Owens

The spec wasn't very clear about this; S32/Containers - Hash said that certain iterator methods iterate "… the elements of %hash in no apparent order, but the order will be the same between successive calls to these functions, as long as %hash doesn't change."

S09 - Hashes didn't say anything about it at all.

I said I would ask around. Thanks to the excellent community channel #perl6 on Freenode, I got an answer similar to this: no, this is unspecified/undefined behaviour, but feel free to come up with a better way of saying it, and update the synopses.

And how hard is it to update the synopses? Not at all! If we want to contribute, we get access. It's as easy and simple as that.

First, you need to check out the (part of) the svn repository that you want to contribute to:

svn co http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/docs/Perl6

Then you change whatever you want to change, preferably discuss it with some of the experienced souls on #perl6 or e.g. the Perl 6 language mailing list, show diffs on e.g. gist.github.org or paste.lisp.org, and if you think you're doing the right thing - commit the change.

"But I can't commit, I only have read access" you might say. Just ask in any of the mentioned fora for a "commit bit" and state your e-mail address and preferred username, and someone will help you out with that part.

As we say on #perl6: community++

I got started, will you join me?