It's in the bag: How to cheat at interviews using Perl 6

John Haltiwanger (‎ab5tract‎)

Thursday, 10 August 2017 12:15

45 minutes

Any

English 

The debate between "large" and "small" languages has raged for decades. Perl has always favored a rich operator landscape over a lean one and Perl 6 notoriously doubles down on this impulse.

This means that your code can avoid external libraries while at the same time allowing a degree of expressivity that leads to compact solutions. These two dynamics make it ideal for blowing the minds of your interviewers -- so long as you can answer the question: Can you explain how these higher-level functions work?

And that shines light on a third dynamic of Perl 6. The internals are written in either Perl 6 or NQP, allowing the interviewee to understand the lower-level implementation details of the fancy functions they use in their solutions -- or even patch those functions to allow for an even fancier solution!

Join me for a discussion of how these dynamics work together in some specific examples, starting from my own work in unifying and extending the bag and set operators in pure Perl 6 and running through the much faster, more optimized code in NQP that has since replaced it. 

bags mixes nqp operators optimization perl6 progress sets