Flurry of Perl 6 activity picks up new contributors, and one old one

Patrick Michaud has written up a huge recap of recent activity in Parrot and Perl 6 in the past few days. As Patrick points out, "there is a huge amount of activity taking place with Perl 6 and Parrot; in fact, most of what I've written about here has occurred in the [past] 72 hours." Highlights include:

• make perl6 target in Parrot
• Patrick added the "defined-or" operator and the @*ARGS array to the perl6 compiler
• Jonathan Worthington added a preliminary version of 'given'/'when'
• Jerry Gay has been adding radix conversions to perl6,
• Will Coleda is working on a web interface for high-priority RT tickets
• the Perl 6 wiki has also gotten received quite a bit of reorganization

All the Perl 6 and Parrot buzz brought Simon Cozens out of the woodwork. Simon's been involved with Perl 6 since the very beginning, but hasn't been worked on the project for a while. He's checked out the current status of Parrot and Perl 6, and he likes what he sees:

There's a perl6 make target which builds Perl 6 binary, for heaven's sake, and it runs real live Perl 6 code. It's there, right now. [But] what excites me is the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.

[P]eople were saying that Perl 6 was going to be written in Perl 6, and I was, well, let's say, a little sceptical. But you know what? They've done it. I am astounded. It is lovely.

Here's hoping Simon sticks around for a while and helps keep this burst of Perl 6 energy going!