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The Perl 6 programming language had a turbulent birth. It was announced in the summer of 2000 and the first stable language release shipped out only 2 years ago, on Christmas, 2015. A lot has happened during that decade and a half, yet the details are hard to piece together.

After my recent facelift to rakudo.org, I'm working on a (second) facelift to perl6.org website.

Part of the work involves bringing all the Perl 6 deliverables under one umbrella, so the user isn't thrown around multiple websites, trying to find what to install. At the same time, we want to strengthen the distinction between Perl 6 the language and the compilers that implement it, as well as encourage more implementors to give it a go at implementing a Perl 6 programming language compiler.

The Perl 6 Programming Language Museum will be part of that effort and along with interesting tidbits of Perl 6 history, it'll showcase past implementation attempts that may no longer be in active development today. Since I don't know much about what happened before I came to the language sometime in 2015, I need your help in collecting those tidbits.

Larry Wall at FOSDEM 2015, photo by Klapi

In my mind's eye, I'm imagining a few pages on perl6.org; something in the same vein as Computer History Museum's pages—pictures, years, and info, and potentially links to code repositories. Depending on the content we collect, it's possible there will be a digital PDF version of the Museum that can also be printed and handed out at events, if desired.

I'm looking for:

• Descriptions of interesting/significant events (like the mug throwing incident).
• Descriptions of interesting/significant implementations of Perl 6 or influential Perl 6 projects. Having links to repos/tarballs of their code is a plus.
• Samples of interesting/significant email threads or chat logs.
• Pictures of interesting/significant objects (first sight at plush Camelias?).
• Pictures of interesting/significant humans (a filled out model release form is required).
• Anything else that's Museum worthy.

If you have any of these items, please submit them to the appropriate year directory in the Perl 6 Museum Items repository. If you're a member of Perl 6 GitHub org, you should already have a commit bit to that repo. Otherwise, submit your items via a pull request.

Let's build something cool and interesting for the people using Perl 6 a hundred years from now to look at and remember!

If you have any questions or need help, talk to a human on our IRC chat.

-OFun