Perl 6 documentation (Re^2: To monks who are interested in contributing to Perl 6 but are not now doing so. What is stopping you?)

[raiph]

Updated Nov 2013. Reformatted, tweaked content, mentioned videos and jnthn's slides.

Added Dec 2013. re: 'internal architecture/design for hackers'.

If you last looked more than 18 months ago, I'd say the doc situation has significantly improved. There isn't a complete manual by any means, but perhaps what is now in place is enough to get some folk up to speed.

New since summer 2012 or thereabouts:

• There's a solid start of what may become the complete manual you seek. This is p6doc, a Perl 6 analog to Perl 5's perldoc led by Moritz Lenz. Issues and patches are welcome at its github repo (a link is in the footer of its pages).

• Carl Mäsak wrote a month long series of daily blogs taking the reader from an introduction to P6 through to writing a small game in P6.

• Carl Mäsak created and ran a Perl 6 programming competition (he's published results for knights-from-knaves and rectangle haikus).

• Carl Mäsak prepared and hosted the #masakism workshop teaching good programming practice in both Perl 5 and 6 (considered by him a success. He subsequently scheduled a repeat on June 19).

• Carl Mäsak prepared and presented three Zero to Perl 6 training sessions as part of the Perl 6 elements of YAPC::NA held in early June. Videos of at least some of these are on youtube.

• Gabor Szabo began building up his Perl 6 Maven site.

• jnthn has added many excellent PDFs corresponding to talks he's given at various conferences. (Unfortunately the index I've linked to is out of date at the time I'm writing this; please bug him on #perl6 to update it!)

• There are a bunch of videos on youtube.

Of course, some doc related projects started more than a year ago have been further developed. Most notably, Larry Wall, with help from a few others, has pushed the count of Perl 6 Rosettacode entries to around 600.

(Talking of Larry, he has said he is working toward publishing an O'Reilly book, a Perl 6 equivalent of the Perl 5 "bible" Programming Perl.)

With all that said, a word of caution. If by "user" you mean relying on Perl 6 the way someone might rely on Perl 5, things are far, far from that. Perl 6 won't be able to support users and doesn't need contributors in the way that Perl 5 supports users and needs contributors; Perl 6 can only support users willing to work with it despite its many weaknesses and relatively high rate of change from release to release.

Hth someone!

[Anonymous Monk]

"a solid start of what may become" ?

What is so defective in perl-6 that you believe that is acceptible? Is that supposed to make people happier about perl-6? Why not tell people "oh the source code documents itself" and admit that you hate the users you don't have? What is so hard to admit about that?