My attention was brought this week to Code in the dark events. It seems pretty cool. A 15 minutes race in html and css with no preview. But the thing that brought my attention to that format is the special editor used for those events with a special effect on the cursor. It seems to add a really dramatic effect on the competition. We need more ideas like that for pure geek fun.

First look at perl 6

For many people, Perl sounds like trauma. Because it didn’t move for a while, when I hear something is perl code, it sounds like it’s legacy code, old and dusty. Well, Perl 6 is going to come out for christmas and the situation may change. Perl 6 is in the lab for 15 years now, it’s more than time to get it shipped.

At first glance, they seem to have tried to ‘modernize’ the language, make it more idiomatic. It even seems it looks more like ruby, with the replacement of arrow by dots, the optional parenthesis, better exception handling. Well, overall, it feels cleaner. But it also seem to have some potential to mix functional and object-oriented in an interesting way.

So, maybe there is going to be a second life for the old perl. It’s a breaking version, old perl code will certainly break on the new version. So it’s almost like a new language. For sure I will still keep ruby as my preferred language, but I like multilingualism, so maybe I will give it a try .. again (last perl app I wrote was 12 years ago).