Patrick Michaud spreads the word at FOSDEM

Hooray for spreading the word! Patrick Michaud impressed this attendee at FOSDEM with his talk about Parrot and Rakudo Perl.

The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl: the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime. (Emphasis mine -- Andy)

This kind of PR is invaluable as we pass the tipping point to getting Perl 6 and Rakudo Perl out the door. Thanks, Patrick.

Addendum: Here's some more good stuff reported:

The talk about Perl 6 was the most interesting for me. I didn’t really like Perl <5 primarily because of having too many ways to do the same in exactly the same way but with a different syntax. I knew that Perl 6 was a total and backwards incompatible redesign of the language, build on top of a generic and good virtual machine called Parrot. Parrot, which I hadn’t given a proper look yet, turned out to be a lot greater than expected. You write support for a new language in Parrot by writing in a subset of Perl 6, which with it’s new Regular Expressions and specializations (tokens: regex without backtracking, etc), was looking very suited for it.

Except for all the new syntactic very very sweet sugar (on which I won’t (yet) elaborate) they added in Perl 6, the greatest one (which is actually more of a Parrot thing) is being able to extend Perl during runtime: writing new parser rules. One application is being able to define ‘!’ as a faculty operator. I’m itching to play with it.