Today is the halfway point of the Perl 6 Advent Calendar (and indeed any advent calendar). For 12 days you have learned various nuggets of information, and most likely experimented with those various bits of knowledge. You feel great, wonderful, stuff works!

And then it didn’t work.

You may have found your way to some documentation (available at http://perl6.org/documentation by the way), and potentially even some talk of Real People™ out there ready to help you. Whatever you’ve done, today’s post is given to you to display the two main methods of helping in the Perl 6 Universe.

The Mailing Lists

The first of two major communication channels is the mailing lists. If you head on over to http://perl6.org/community, you can see on the right hand side a list of the several lists you can subscribe to/peruse the archives of. If you have question s about the language, such as “How do I add up all the numers in an array without a loop?”, go for perl6-users. The mailing list is great for those who can’t use IRC or want more permanent discussions. Have an idea for the language? Try perl6-language, where people discuss the language itself. Things like “I think there should be a beat-object-with-catfish operator in the language” go here.

Now, the mailing lists aren’t the only option. Your question could be simple-when-you-know-it, or maybe that feature you really really want is already there! For these reasons, you may want to run your comments by the IRC community.

The #perl6 IRC channel

If you want to use something more instantaneous instead, or you hate the idea of signing up to a mailing list for one question, head over to the channel #perl6 on irc.freenode.net. Here, the community is reputed as being one of the nicest on the Internet (so if you’ve been burned by IRC channels before and vowed “Never again shall I use IRC!”, try #perl6.)

#perl6 is like an eccentric incarnation of The Doctor, multifaceted in its nature. We have punfests, technotalk, lolz, above-your-head language design, and more (thanks sorear for reminding me of that)! So come and ask away!

Final Words

These are the two ways of communication in the Perl 6 universe. There are also blogs, screencasts, and more. Go to http://perl6.org to check it all out!