Raku/book

Using Perl6: Chap 5: Multis: need self-contained example

Opened this issue · 3 comments

Turning to Chap 5, "Multis," I immediately groan when I see that to follow the arguments in this chapter, I have to download a separate distribution from github and figure out how to install it. I have to figure out how libraries work in Perl6, even though there has been no discussion of this at this point in the PDF. From a heuristic point of view -- actually getting people to study and learn Perl 6 -- this is definitely suboptimal.

I would recommend re-writing this chapter with a self-contained example that the reader could simply type in and play with.

Thank you very much.

The multi example is self-contained - there's just a library available that wraps that stuff a bit, and makes it available in a convenient way.

We should make that a bit clearer in the text, but I don't see why you'd need to download the library to try out the example in that chapter.

Are you saying that I should simply be able to type in the code examples and it should "just work"?

BTW: When I do go to the github site listed for JSON, I am told that I have to go to yet another site and get 'ufo'. Then I am advised, "(installation is not yet supported; you can do that manually by copying the .pm files from lib/ recursivley in your ~/.perl6/lib/ dir; installing .pir files is discouraged, since simple changes in Rakudo will render them worthless, might result in confusing errors)."

Which, as a newcomer to Rakudo, I translate to: "A lot of work ... and even then it might not work." ;-)

yes, it should "just work". I'm currently working on adding a calling example to the text of the book; unfortunately something in rakudo broke, so I'm hunting that down first.

Regarding module installation, yes, it's a mess right now. We're working on it (and could use any help we can get)