How a little play to talk about Perl 6 and teaching programming to a new generation of non-programmers was made.

I usually present at the FOSDEM Perl devroom. As in real presentation, with slides and all. presentations can be funnier or boringer (is that a thing), but well, they are presentations.

This year, after my experience teaching programming in a new way, and using Perl 6, I decided to present that as a play.

Saying this poses a few risks is an understatement. But I wanted to cover a few objectives. First one I have always been fascinated with the skills and amusement people in Perl conferences showed. I remember someone dressing as a Starfleet cadet, people presenting in Klingon, real shows. The Perl community, myself included, have become lately a bit more… stayed, maybe, that would be the word.

Second, I really wanted to open the community. Perl is a great language, but other newfangled languages are getting all the attention. Perl 6 is being preached mainly to the choir. It is a new language, with great features, but mainly presented to people as their 3rd or 4th language. My point was that it could and should be used as a first language, as in the first language you learn.

And related to that point, computing and programming has become a life skill. So why not teach Perl 6 in such a way that even people that are not going to deploy Perl 6 in a microservices architecture to the cloud can use and profit from it? Besides, I really wanted to learn Perl 6. The best way to learn Perl 6 is to try and show someone how to use it. And there’s the book I’m writing along with the classes which might be published some day if I arrive to something that might be called complete.

Last but not least, the best way to have more women speaking in Perl events is to, well, to have more women speaking in Perl events. So instead of being just myself, a man, yadda-yadding about that, it’s the best if you have a woman talk about it. I gave class to my three daughters, and one of them is coming along with me to act in the play. Teamwork is one of the things I wanted to convey during the experience, so we have effectively collaborated writing the play , as you can see in the pull requests.

Finally, I had never written a play. It so happens that there is a markup language for screenplays called Fountain with great support in Emacs and a great way of generating scripts. I have used it to generate this script, which is obviously free under a creative commons cc-by-sa license. The play mentions a presentation, which is the only scenario we will use. It needs t shirts and a few props, but it can be represented by two persons. Volunteers will probably be needed, but that’s it.

Needless to say, I’m panicking from actually doing this kind of thing instead of your usual “look what I did last Christmas” in bullet points and nice meme-dotted slides.

But I’m happy too. We will be continuing the classes in a very short time.