The Ovidian Update
Haven't posted anything for a while, but I'm not dead, just busy. Here's a quick recap of things that I think people might find of interest.
First and foremost, I'm going to be in Brussels, Belgium, next weekend for FOSDEM. If you can make it, check out the Perl track. I'll be speaking about why people are finding Perl 6 so exciting. In particular, ever since the Christmas release, there's been a fair amount of chatter about Perl 6 and I've been paying a lot of attention to people who are looking at it for the first time, without a lot of preconceived notions. The reactions often range from "wow, that's cool", to "oh my goodness, I want that!" What's even more interesting is that they're not focusing on a particular feature (which would be scary as it would pigeonhole Perl 6 as a "niche" language). Instead, plenty of people getting excited about different things which scratch their particular programming fetishes: grammars, gradual typing, concurrency, and so on. It's fun to watch.
But there's more ...
I haven't written much about the Veure MMORPG lately because I've been swamped with stuff to do. However, we have a narrative team focusing on the non-linear missions, backend devs furiously trying to add everything we need for an alpha, and front-end devs trying to make it look pretty and work well. We're getting closer to the point where we can start telling more people about it and writing a blog dedicated to the game (and maybe even tell people what the real name is).
The image above, by the way, is art for a cloning center. Veure may be a text-driven MMORPG, but it ain't ugly. We have a great artist and a great designer working hard to make sure the game is beautiful. All those earlier screenshots you saw? Yeah, ugly as sin. The layout is sort of the same, but the graphics are much, much nicer. It's really turning into a beautiful game.
And on top of that, I need to get my French driving license. That's probably the hardest of the lot.
Freelance Perl/Testing/Agile consultant and trainer. See http://www.allaroundtheworld.fr/ for our services. If you have a problem with Perl, we will solve it for you.
And don't forget to buy my book! http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Curtis-Poe/dp/1118013840/
You're going to finish porting it to Perl6 before release, won't you? ... :-)
MMORP6G ...
Fritz: I'd considered writing utilities in Perl 6, or down the road, a command line client, but for now, Perl 6 is too slow and doesn't have the required libraries. Otherwise, I'd love to!
With a MOP and non-experimental subroutine signatures, Perl 5 would handle most of my needs, though :)
Thanks for the Veure updates! I agree with your assessment of how outsiders have viewed Perl6 as I personally fall into that category. Although Perl5 gets a worse rep that it perhaps deserves, its biggest issue is that there are plenty of other similar languages (python, ruby, ...etc) that offer similar functionality in an arguably cleaner fashion. Perl6 has got a clean and elegant OO design with MOP, grammars, upcoming macros, and easy parallelism/concurrency.