Downey Allen - Think Perl 6 how to think like a computerscientist

In the course of the last three to four years, I have translated or adapted to French a number of tutorials and articles on Perl 6, and Ive also written a few entirely new ones in French. Together, these documents represented by the end of 2015 somewhere between 250 and 300 pages of material on Perl 6. By that time, I had probably made public more material on Perl 6 in French than all other authors taken together.

In late 2015, I began to feel that a Perl 6 document for beginners was something missing that I was willing to undertake. I looked around and found that it did not seem to exist in English either. I came to the idea that, after all, it might be more useful to write such a document initially in English, to give it a broader audience. I started contemplating writing a beginner introduction to Perl 6 programming. My idea at the time was something like a 50- to 70-page tutorial and I started to gather material and ideas in this direction.

Then, something happened that changed my plans.

In December 2015, friends of mine were contemplating translating into French Allen B. Downeys Think Python, Second Edition.

While working on the French translation of Allens Python book, the idea came to me that, rather than writing a tutorial on Perl 6, it might be more useful to make a Perl 6 translation of Think Python. Since I was in contact with Allen in the context of the French translation, I suggested this to Allen, who warmly welcomed the idea. This is how I started to write this book late January 2016, just after having completed the work on the French translation of his Python book.

This book is thus largely derived on Allens Think Python, but adapted to Perl 6. As it happened, it is also much more than just a Perl 6 translation of Allens book: with quite a lot of new material, it has become a brand new book, largely indebted to Allens book, but yet a new book for which I take all responsibility. Any errors are my own, not Allens.

My hope is that this will be useful to the Perl 6 community, and more broadly to the open source and general computer programming communities. In an interview with LinuxVoice (July 2015), Larry Wall, the creator of Perl 6, said: We do think that Perl 6 will be learnable as a first language. Hopefully this book will contribute to making this happen.