Perl 6 Documentation

There's copious amounts of documentation for Perl 6 in the form of the Synopses but sometimes it just doesn't explain things in a way that mere mortals can understand. In order to help these mortals I've created a github project for other, hopefully more approachable Perl 6 documents. This repository can be found at http://github.com/perlpilot/perl6-docs

I figure there will be 3 kinds of documents that will be useful to have:

• Introductions
• Tutorials
• Quick References

Check out the README for what goes in these documents.

I've seeded the repository with the beginnings of a Perl 6 Regex quick ref and an article I wrote a while back as an introduction to Perl 6 Regex.

I haven't actually thought too much about other people contributing to the repository yet. I mainly started this because I've always got ideas kicking around for things to write about but I rarely start something. This repository gives me a place to at least start writing (I have no excuses now!). But if someone wants a commit bit, just email me at duff@pobox.com.

Also, earlier today on #perl6 we talked about various book efforts relating to Perl 6. I don't know if books on Perl 6 should also go here, but I'm certainly not opposed to it if someone wants to contribute :-)

Small, shiny focus.

Recently, I was reading Chad Fowler's excellent book, "The Passionate Programmer" and I'd gotten to Part III: Executing. Chapter 23, "Be Where You're At" struck a chord with me. The hypothetical person in that chapter was always looking for the next thing that will advance their career instead of paying attention their job, so they tended to do mediocre work. I'm not quite like that guy, but I have noticed that my procrastination manifests itself as an inability to focus on whatever it is that I should be working on because there's always another, more interesting problem to solve. In short, I'm easily distracted by small shiny objects :)

Then I was reading PerlMonks where kiz asked a question about Perl's auto-incrementing of strings. moritz replied with a brief
exposition of how it works in Perl 6.

That post reminded me of one of the small contributions I made to Perl 6. I wrote some code to implement the Perl 6 semantics of string increment for Rakudo. That code has long since been replaced but the important thing was that at some point in the past, I was able to identify a small problem space in a language that I enjoy and did something about it. I was able to push through to a solution without being distracted by small shiny objects. (Although, I imagine that it was the shiny, distracting object for some other task that I should have been working on)

Thinking of that past contribution ignited some small desire to do that again despite the distractions in my life. Ergo, I intend on finding small perl-related things to focus on for as long as possible and then a little longer if necessary until I get to a stopping point and then I'll blog about it. Hopefully, as I exercise those neurons dealing with focus, they'll get stronger and the distractions will impinge upon my brain less.