A polyglot programming group meeting in the heart of The Beave. We seem to talk a lot about oddball programming languages and their features. And the usual geekery you'd expect from a programmer's group.

This month we'll be running Rakudo * to get some exposure to the new Perl 6 language features and check out the Rakudo * ("star") release (a Perl 6 implementation on Parrot.)

The * series is a more featured, predictable, and stable user-focussed release than the git master or monthly development releases of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler. This is less cutting-edge than the current development version, and is intended to give early users a relatively slow-moving target to experiment with language features and use cases.

Speaking of slow-moving, Rakudo is really, really slow. This is not the production-grade performance you know from Perl 5, this is the westside's MO of oddball programming language geekery and bloody stumps. We're so cutting edge, we might even start the meeting before the release tarball drops. Just in case, here's the instructions for building git master rakudo:

  git clone
  cd rakudo
  perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
  make
  make install

  PATH=$PWD/parrot_install/bin:$PATH
  perl6 -e 'say "hello"'

Perl 6 is a substantially different language from Perl 5. If you haven't kept up with the developments in the last few years, now is a good time to take it for a spin.

speaker: Jonathan 'Duke' Leto

How to write and install Perl 6 modules.

Jonathan will use his module (Algorithm::Soundex) as an example and cover how to install modules with panda (the equivalent of cpanminus for Perl 6)

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.