I just committed my first change to the perl6 spectest suite. It’s exciting because perl6 has all of the great functional chaining that I love about ruby, but it also has killer awesome features that extremely few modern languages have (AST based macros anyone?) But it’s been in active development for almost four years now and people have talked about it for almost nine! So what do you do when you see these amazing things that are just outside of our reach? Jump in and help!

Helping with perl6, especially the test suite, is not hard at all. The first thing you will want to do is find something to do. One good place to look is here. But that’s really not all. If you read through the spec files (a really great way to learn perl6 if you learn by examples) and look at the generated pod files you will surely find some discrepancies in the tests.

Once you find something you are confident that you can do join the irc channel (irc.freenode.net/#perl6) and ask for a commit bit for pugs. Then you’ll just download the source,

svn co http://username@svn.pugscode.org/pugs/

make changes (probably in t/spec), and check them in.

And now you have helped implement the spec for perl6!

This is what I did in high school:

fREW => fROOH Represents Encephelon Welkin

fROOH => fRUE: Robotic Ominous Ossified Herald

fRUE => fRIOUX’s Rectitude is Underpinned by Equivalence

fRIOUX => fiSMBoC RESEARCHes IMAGINATIVE ORGANIC UNIFICATIONS like XUOIRf

fiSMBoC => fREW is Station’s Most Bodacious Creation

RESEARCH => Robots Eagerly Sailing Epic Artificial Rhythmic Cyclical Homonyms

IMAGINATIVE => Insane Mimicries of Amazingly Gorgeous, Incomplete Networks, Axiomatic Theorems, and Immortally Vivacious Ecstasy

ORGANIC => Original Renditions of Genetic Art Naturally Increasing in Complexity

UNIFICATIONS => Unions Normally Identified From Initial Characters; Aesthetically Tailored to Infer Other Notions Subconsciously