Perl 6 ponderings

I wonder when the new Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials will come out? It was supposed to come out yearly. I guess that didn't turn out to be very practical. I'd like to see a "Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers". The examples I have run across are pretty generic Perl. I guess I should be glad. Perl 6 isn't as scary as it is played up to be.

Finally installed Perl 6

Tried Pugs - had a difficult time with the development framework required. Rakudo Perl 6 went on pretty smoothly once I added the --gen-parrot parameter to the "perl Configure.pl" command. Made a hello.pl6 program that used Perl 5.10's "say" command (without the usual preface in the code to invoke 5.10 stuff). Yeah, pretty weak. Need to look at some more interesting examples. (and now I can!)

use Net::LDAP::LDIF - no, really, use it!

It took me a while to figure this one out. I guess if I had a better grasp of hashes, this would've been more obvious. The LDIF I was reading was HUGE. I found a good example on PerlMonks that showed this VERY useful line:

$uid = $entry->get_value("uid");

I used DataDumper to find the key names of the other values and then I was off and running: parsing an LDIF filled with 40,000 users and running reports on anything I wanted. On my workstation, it only took 24 seconds to generate multiple reports! VERY COOL!

Joining The Perl Iron Man Program

Just noticed the Iron Man blogging Challenge at Enlightened Perl. Sounds fun - promoting Perl by blogging about it. Funny - that came up at work recently. The younger guys at work here are convinced Perl died a long time ago and I should be learning Python. "Have you noticed NO ONE is talking about Perl anymore?!" they chided. One thing that lead them to believe that (I think) was my homepage which had a programming republic of Perl icon which had been linked to perl.com for years. Since I force my web page to be the homepage for every server I manage, they see this site a lot (and they like it!). The Perl icon used to take you to this stale website that had all of the really old post dates plainly in view. (Funny - they have removed the post dates now.) But I wanted to convince them Perl wasn't dead (just Perl.com), so I changed my programming republic of Perl icon to point at a custom page of Perl links I threw together. It had active sites like Perl Buzz, Perl Monks, Planet Perl and Use Perl. I also included the [somewhat] nearby and very active Perl Monger Groups: St.Louis Perl Mongers and Purdue Perl Mongers. The guys here are not convinced yet, but maybe the Iron Man competition will throw Perl back on their radar and make it "fashionable" (to them) once again. Meanwhile, I'll still use it to "get things done". :-p