I attended a talk given by Damian Conway a couple of years ago where he talked about Perl 6. Everybody in the room was glued to his every word. He sketched out the really grand ideas for Perl 6 and lots of brilliant design ideas. It looked like they were stealing the very best programming language ideas out there and modifying it to fit into the Perl culture.

Since then things have quietened down. I gave it another look late last night and saw that there was this cool new project Pugs. Essentially a very talented Perl hacker has been working for the last month to implement the full Perl6 specifications in Haskell (Pugs is a play on Hugs).

I’m pretty excited to try it out. Perl is one of those languages I have a love/hate relationship with. You can do some amazing things with it but you have to deal with the ugliness it’s flexibility gives.