Everyone has hobbies, well almost everyone does anyway. Those who don't, really should. Hobbies help you stay relaxed. They also help keep you from going insane. Some people play sports, some collect things, some go fishing or hunting, and others yet let their creative juices flow. I'm one of the latter.

I've been playing with Ruby lately, and am quite enjoying it. It seems like a very clean language, and has a lot of good features going for it as well, including testing frameworks such as RSpec and Cucumber. Being me, I wondered what a Perl 6 version would look like. Also being me, I decided that the best way to find out, would be to write it.

Not sure if you've ever needed to rename a hash key before, but I have. I also noticed that it doesn't look like any of the languages I work with have a native method/function to rename hash keys. So, I've taken the liberty to write them. These are just for fun, and are released as public domain code snippets, feel free to use them in whatever you want. There are versions for Perl 6, Ruby, Perl 5 and Python. Enjoy!

So, yesterday the Perl 6 Advent Calendar had a challenge, to make a decent version of the ancient Caesar Cipher. Well, while looking into that, I found an article about the Vigenère cipher and thought, hey, that could be interesting. Further searches revealed that there was already a Perl 5 module that had been designed to implement the cipher. I took it upon myself to port Crypt::Vigenere to Perl 6, and think the results are pretty cool. It's not a CPAN-ready module by any stretch, but it gives you an idea of what is possible using Perl 6, right now, today.

And now one for those who say Perl 6 isn't the coolest thing since sliced bread. I've been reading the Perl blogosphere, and found a couple of posts that show off some what happens when you convert an advanced Perl 5 program into Perl 6. The results are definitely amazing.

So, for the last few months, I've been playing with Perl 6. I know, it's not ready for production use yet, and probably won't be for a while, but it's still fun to play with. This article isn't really an introduction to Perl 6, nor an in depth review. It's more of my feelings about it so far, and why I think Perl 6 rocks.

You ever get the feeling that things couldn't get much more confusing? You feel that your life is swirling around you, and nothing much makes sense anymore?