The Copenhagen Perl 6 Hackathon and the Open Source Days conference is over.

I am left filled with magnificent impressions and at the same time suffering from a mild case of information overload.

Due to a collision with the Dutch Perl Workshop the Copenhagen Perl 6 Hackathon was scheduled to start Saturday and continue Sunday, where the Open Source Days conference started friday. In addition we had arranged for the invited Perl 6 people to have some time on their own to discuss and hack face to face, something that have shown beneficial previously for other dispersed project groups.

We started the Saturday with a line of Perl 6 presentations – there was a good turn up to the talks, also by people who I have not seen at Copenhagen Perl Mongers meetings.

I have received little, but very positive feedback on the event. One of the more interesting pieces of feedback was this tweet (http://twitter.com/Jippi/status/10071258756), which really pin-pointed that we are doing the right thing and having fun at the same time.

Perl 6 is different and I think that it is important to emphasize the difference, not just different from Perl 5, but different in many aspects and from other languages. I can only say that I think that Perl 6 will be a very modern language and as Perl 5 programmer I will need to rethink the ways I am writing Perl.

I overheard a discussion over some Perl 6 construct and one of the comments was that it was not a very Perl 6-ish way of doing things – Perl 5 is not Perl 6. Personally I am very keen on getting to use Perl 6, but I have slowly started to understand that it will be significant change. Perl 6 will address many short-comings in Perl 5 naturally, the primary language designer is the same person, but in general Perl 6 is a new language and it will address short-comings in many languages. Yes it will also have it’s own, but then we then we just address that in Perl 7 – implemented in Perl 6 magnificent isn’t it…

My experience with this kind of events is that it takes some time before the actual result show. I hope that we will be able to attract some new people to the Copenhagen Perl Mongers – and I hope that the Perl 6 community have benefitted from the opportunity to present Perl 6 at a large open source non-perl conference.

The aftermath of the hackathon is hopefully going to be more positive than the aftermath of the Open Source Days conference. One of the exhibitors made a small happening at the conference involving body painted girls. The IT business in Denmark has for a long time been working hard on attracting women to a business, that is always short on clever people of both genders. Based on the blog entries and comments I have seen the conclusion must be that the happening was a bad idea – a really bad idea and I can only concur.

Implementation wise I hope we have been able to contribute over the weekend and that we have earned the Copenhagen release – I am working on my first larger Perl 6 application and it is fun. I am constantly refactoring the code to be more Perl 6 and training my brain to start using Perl 6 patterns.

Thanks to all the invited Perl 6 people, attendees and the coord of Open Source Days for giving us the opportunity to show of Perl 6.

jonasbn, logicLAB