Strangely Consistent

Musings about programming, Perl 6, and programming Perl 6

About "Strangely consistent"

I needed a space where I could blog about Perl 6. This is it.

The blog is a bunch of statically generated HTML pages. As it happens, the program that generates these pages is written in Perl 6.

The phrase "strangely consistent" refers to the tendency of even unrelated parts of the design to exhibit patterns or interact in some way. It originated somewhere in the vicinity of Patrick Michaud during YAPC::EU 2009.

This blog is meant to last for at least ten years.

About licensing

All the material on this blog is published under a creative commons Attribution-Sharealike license.

About masak

My head's up in the clouds. If I don't seem to be fully present when you're talking to me, it might be because I am thinking about something really hard and not paying much attention to my surroundings. Sorry about that. I have a vivid and sometimes time-consuming inner life. I don't have a wide-screen TV — I have a mental whiteboard.

Generally, I find life bewildering and inexplicable. While firmly planted on the rational side of things, I also have a big reservoir of wonder for most everything. I'm not easily impressed by ideology. I tend to be pretty awed by reality, though.

I find great pleasure in programming. Sometimes the joy I extract from it surprises me. Had I been born in the Middle Ages, I would probably have been a monk of some sort, working as a scribe, and thinking about esoteric religious problems all day. Having been born in our modern age, I take to programming. Data structures and algorithms nourish me. I get to try to implement them, and see them come to life.

I might never become a truly good programmer. I do try my best to learn new things, though. To become slightly better with each time unit. Allegedly that puts me in the 80th percentile.

About Perl 6

I like Perl 6. I program Perl 6. For a couple of years now, Perl 6 has been my primary language of choice. It's not a smooth, clean experience to be programming Perl 6 in 2011, but if you squint, you can see a really nice language peeking out under the slowness and the bugs. That keeps me going.

The more I learn about Perl 5, the more impressed I am by it. Perl 5 has a lot of things Perl 6 doesn't have yet: speed, stability, sane memory usage, excellent tools, a massive library, and thousands of contributors. While Perl 6 is deliberately taking different paths in a lot of cases, I think there is also a lot to learn from the Perl 5 community. Keeping the channels between the Perl 5 and Perl 6 communities open is non-trivial, but it helps both communities.

I believe Perl 5 and Perl 6 are two different languages in the Perl family of languages.