The Perl and Raku Conference - Greenville, SC 2026
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2021
1:07:43 · 12K views · Jun 20, 2016
Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.
HN recommends it as an entertaining, technically masterful showcase of what Perl 6 can do.
6 comments from Hacker News
Of course. (For some people.) Here are some videos to give a flavor of the last few years of Perl 6 as it graduated from alpha in 2014 to beta in 2015 to the first ready for production releases of the Rakudo compiler in 2016, to outsiders doing videos about it in 2019 (last video). * 2014. "There's this question of belief". 30 seconds. Charming point made by Perl creator Larry Wall (during a long talk). [LINK] * 2014. "My first P6 program". 3 minute "lightning talk" presentation to an audience of Perl folk. P5er Stefan Seifert shows what they learned and pulled off less than 24 hours after first writing P6 code. (This start led to [LINK] ) [LINK] * 2015. "P5 Pigs". 6 minute "lightning talk" with audience participation at a Perl conference. Stephen Scaffidi sings his heart out about tensions in the Perl community about Perl 5 "vs" Perl 6. (In reality it's not "vs". They're different languages in the same family, analogous to the way Clojure and Racket are both in the Lisp family.) [LINK] * 2015. "Hacking on Rakudo Compiler". 10 minute live coding screencast. Rob Hoelz looks into 3 bugs. [LINK] * 2016. "Perl 6 for beginners". A conference keynote. An hour, or 15 minutes if you're in a hurry. Damian Conway is brilliant and hilarious. If you've never seem him, you're in for a treat. I strongly recommend the full hour. You will not be disappointed. The first link below is for the full hour, the second jumps to the closing 15 minute "crash course on quantum computing". this video [VID
Right, yes, for continued fractions / convergent series, floats are almost certainly going to be a complete disaster whereas if only integer division is involved, as is the case with this series, then arbitrary precision rationals are going to be exact, and often sufficiently performant for most such series for results up to about 15 decimal digits or so. Damian demonstrates this difference between using floats and arbitrary precision rationals when he shows code for computing Bernoulli numbers in his "On The Shoulders Of Giants" presentation.[0] (Btw, if you care about programming and appreciate a combination of total technical and geek mastery with standup comic delivery, the whole thing is like watching a great movie, whether you watch it from the "start" at the 5 minute mark, or skip forward to the 45 minute mark for the 15 minute Quantum Computing For Beginners section.) [0] this video
With all due respect to Larry Wall he shouldn't be a source of info or inspiration when it comes to Perl6. Watch this instead, it's pretty damn great this video
To me, it's mostly the presence of all new CS inventions in core. Like you don't need any damn libraries to paralellize stuff, just use `start` block or a `supply`. If you write accounting software, you'll appreciate built-in rationals so that 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3, unlike so many other languages. Laziness is present in many things like lazy exceptions, string generation, and sequences: say (3, 9 … ∞)[^20] does not hang and produces (3 9 15 21 27 33 39 45 51 57 63 69 75 81 87 93 99 105 111 117), despite being an infinite sequence. You also have grammars, more readable regex language, and superb object model. On a more advanced spectrum, with grammars and slangs, you can craft your own mini-languages for a specific domain where they would fit better; there's a nice little presentation by Damian Conway where he crafts an operator for quantum mechanical math that looks and functions just like the proper mathematical symbol functions: this video As for the langs you mentioned: I find a lot of similarities between Rust and Perl 6, although in some areas it seems Perl 6 folks did more thinking (like the .match stuff). They are however in different domains, Rust being a systems language; but you can use Rust libraries in Perl 6 via NativeCall if you compile them for C calling convention. Perl 6 smokes Ruby and Python with its asynch/parallel/conc. support and more advanced object model. As far as Unicode support goes, only Swift comes close to Perl 6; try to uppercase "ß" in Ruby, for examp
Aside from the typical, I watched Damian Conway "Standing on the shoulders of giants" from YAPC 2016 last week and found it interesting. Always fun to see a modern feature full language collide with history and algorithms. this video