Advent is known as a preparation for the arrival of something special. While religiously it is the preparation for Christmas, it can also mean the preparation for something that developers need and want. And Perl 6 developers have been waiting a year for the “official,” “released” version, which is why this Christmas (whether they celebrate or not) is particularly important, since there will be “the most official release” of Perl 6 on Christmas Day.

In turn, a community of programmers will be using Perl 6 for real tasks to see if there are any hidden corners that could lead to future changes in the language.

(Related: What’s in store for Perl 6)

With more people trying Perl 6, the Perl team is hoping that it will expand the community and possibly even create more Perl 6 developers. So until Christmas, in preparation of the big release, there is a Perl 6 Advent Calendar with something “cool about Perl 6 every day,” according to the website.

Their first day was about the state of Perl 6 in 2015, where the Perl team gave an overview of Perl 6 and how last year’s summary identified some major areas of work that needed to be done for this year’s release. They also have written about identifiers having hyphens, top programming questions for Perl 6 developers, and how to contribute to open-source projects.

Today’s post talked about how Perl 6 handles Unicode, both text and syntax. And the previous days are still available to read on the Perl 6 advent website.