What was it like to learn Perl 6?

[ErikSchierboom]

We’ve recently started a project to find the best way to design our tracks, in order to optimize the learning experience of students.

As a first step, we’ll be examining the ways in which languages are unique and the ways in which they are similar. For this, we’d really like to use the knowledge of everyone involved in the Exercism community (students, mentors, maintainers) to answer the following questions:

1. How was your experience learning Perl 6? What was helpful while learning Perl 6? What did you struggle with? How did you tackle problems?
2. In what ways did Perl 6 differ from other languages you knew at the time? What was hard to learn? What did you have to unlearn? What syntax did you have to remap? What concepts carried over nicely?

Could you spare 5 minutes to help us by answering these questions? It would greatly help us improve the experience students have learning Perl 6 :)

Note: this issue is not meant as a discussion, just as a place for people to post their own, personal experiences.

Want to keep your thoughts private but still help? Feel free to email me at erik@exercism.io

Thank you!

[petertseng]

I only looked at four exercises (and one of them was hello-world), so this is a limited answer based just on what was encountered in those four.

Of the "For Newcomers" section listed in https://raku.org/resources, I think https://perl6intro.com/ was what worked for me.

After that, I took a look at each page under "Fundamental Topics" in https://docs.perl6.org/language.html, a few of them stood out:

https://docs.perl6.org/type/Signature - very interesting that where constraints can be placed, with what looks like arbitrary code. So sort of like a pre-condition enforced on the arguments of the function.

There's obviously a lot going on with https://docs.perl6.org/language/operators as well, hyper operators, reduction metaoperators, zip metaoperators, and much more that I didn't even get to encounter in these few exercises.

I think that if I explored this language more, the operators page would warrant the most additional study. The syntax is new, but you can think of the concepts in terms of higher-order functions: hyper operators sometimes look like map, reduction metaoperator certainly looks like reduce, and zip metaoperator can be thought of as composing another function with zip

[ErikSchierboom]

We're closing this issue as it was part of our research for the v3 version of Exercism which has just been released.

Thanks everyone for chipping in! It has been greatly appreciated.