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Larry Wall

If you are reading this and you didn't hear that Larry bit the bullet, rolled the dice, flipped the coin, shattered the space time continuum...breathe... then you really are going to get a shock.

Larry has announced that the Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0 of Perl 6.0 in time for his 61st Birthday this year and a Version 1.0 release by Christmas 2015.

So why do I say attempt?

Well it isn't as easy as promising, because we have a real issue if we do such a damn fool thing. There are a number of reasons, aside from the hidden complexities of code, that could scupper the plans. The inevitable bus-in-the-face failure being just one of them. A cautious 'Murphy doth exist' attitude is the right one to take.

What Larry has done is realise that they are most of the way towards achieving a goal they always thought they would fail, as he would say 'he fails good'. For that reason the developers have made the move towards a release this year, this is their best and I get the feeling that's way past what others would consider 'good enough' for a 1.0 release.

The Talk

If you get chance I would recommend looking up the talk online when the videos are made live from FOSDEM. The structure of Larry's talk was an analogy between Perl5--Perl6 and Tolkien's Hobbit--LoTR. This at first felt like it could have been a stretch however as always it was a well-crafted piece that had been deeply thought through.

There was a lot that Larry pulled out to make analogous between the languages and the books and in the structure of the works as well. Added to that Larry is a speaker who can drop from the lofty fifty miles up view into a live demonstration of a few inches in a heartbeat. Larry takes you on a journey but at no point does he let you forget he is not just the storyteller but the scribe colouring the glyphs.