over my years of development on parrot, pugs, and rakudo, i've become much less active in the perl 5 community. for example, i used to frequent perlmonks, but time no longer allows it. instead, i'm now quite active in the perl 6 community. historically, i'm not part of @Larry (the nickname for the perl 6 design team), and although i've been invited to attend the weekly design meeting, it was as a parrot and rakudo developer, not as a designer.

while developing rakudo, i felt the compiler was growing to a point where it'd be useful for folks to do day-to-day programming tasks, and have a little fun with the language revision we've been waiting so long to get. so, i started adding command-line options like -e, -h, -c and -v. rakudo became much friendlier to use, since i could check the syntax of a perl 6 script i wrote, and find what revision of rakudo was failing to parse or run a particular script so i could submit a proper bug report.

then two things happened: it bothered me that there was no spec for the command-line so i couldn't really implement anything more than what i'd done already, and ian hague donated a pile of money to tpf for perl 6 development. i decided to apply for a grant to define and implement the perl 6 command-line syntax, and my grant was accepted. now, i'm in the process of designing a working draft of Synopsis 19, describing the command-line syntax, and soon i'll be writing tests and implementing it in rakudo. all this is being done in a public repository (pugs) with a liberal commit policy, and is being discussed on open mailing-lists and irc channels. i've gotten quite good feedback, a few nice ideas, some excellent questions, and some corrections this way. i wouldn't succeed at this task if not for the support of these helpful folks, too numerous to mention.

i became part of the perl 5 community the first time i wandered online for help (probably sometime late in 1996). i've never submitted a patch to perl5-porters, so although i'm quite adept in using perl 5, i don't come from the perl 5 illuminati. changing my focus to perl 6 development has given me a great education at little cost (just spare time), and i'm now able to give back by designing a crucial feature of perl 6 that countless people will use every day for years to come. if my story isn't a shining example of a "community rewrite" of perl 6, i don't know what is.