Perl6 has just been released, after 15 years of intensive development. Now it's the perfect time for any developer to become a star, or at least to position himself in a very marketable position.
What one has to do to take advantage of the opportunities is to:
What one has to do to take advantage of the opportunities is to:
- Install Perl6 - Following the instructions from the previous URL I had Perl6 installed in about 6 minutes on my dev VM
- Learn Perl6
- Help others to learn Perl6
Opportunities Ahead
StackOverflow
Right now there are currently only 116 questions tagged with Perl6 on SO. In the next period their numbers will increase drastically. Will you be the one to answer the most common ones and have your answers rack upvotes for the years to come?
I currently am in the top 3% overall on SO, with around 13k points. I don't know what impact this fact has on my CV, because I rarely change jobs (3 times in the last 10 years), but I imagine that it should make any worthy tech recruiter more interested in a CV.
I've worked pretty hard to gain those points, having answered to more than 600 questions, but there are easier ways to earn them. One of those methods is to be an early adopter of a new language or framework that will become popular and to be among the first to give helpful answers. And Perl6 is destined to become popular - more on this later.
For example, this answer, which is the second most upvoted answer to that git question, has more than 6500 upvotes. That answer alone brought its owner more than 65k points, propelling him in the top 0.1% overall.
Build Panda Modules
Panda is a module management tool for Perl6. There is a list of most wanted Perl6 modules in case you don't feel very inspired. If you're a rockstar programmer and want to be able to demonstrate your stellar algorithmic powers, what better ways are there than to be the author of a module used by thousands of companies and developers?
Blog and Write Tutorials
Contrary to (at least my) intuition, in order to be popular, you have to approach easy subjects because that's what most people struggle with when they're starting.
You don't have to be a Perl6 expert in order to be able write an entertaining article which will get you thousands of readers over the years (who knows, maybe you are able to position yourself as an authority in the domain). A very important part is to be among the first in the field - in the following days and weeks, you will be, because the Perl6 market is totally not crowded right now.
Perl6 Will Be a Huge Success, Guaranteed
On the technical side, the language is a breath of fresh air in the world of old-age scripting languages. Being built from scratch, the developers had the opportunity, and also took their time, to implement everything as it should be implemented, avoiding hacks and workarounds.
Also, the amount of innovation the language brings in the world of programming is staggering. Larry Wall said that several PhD thesis could be created based on the ideas invested in the language.
If we'd compare programming languages with the startup ecosystem, it's like the founders of Google would create another startup from scratch. Would you believe in it's chance of success, or not?
