Console oriented sites and Perl 6: joining the worlds together

Igor Chubin — 20 minutes 🦋

Console sites or console services are sites that can be accessed from the browser or directly from the terminal, and though in both cases have the same or similar look and feel, accessing them from the terminal is usually preferable because of the advantages of the terminal itself. The question is, could Perl 6 become the main templating language for the console sites? And if yes, what main obstacles will be possibly faced on this way?

Console sites or console services are sites that can be accessed
from the browser or directly from the terminal, and though in both
cases have the same or similar look and feel, accessing them from
the terminal is usually preferable because of the advantages
of the terminal itself.

Typical examples of console sites are wttr.in (weather reporting service),
cheat.sh (documentation service), rate.sx (currency and cryptocurrencies
exchange rates service), just to name a few. The first console service,
wttr.in, was created in 2016. Currently, the number of the popular console
services and sites is more than 30 and growing; most popular console sites
are handling more then 1M queries daily and have a solid community of users.

Contrary to the traditional websites, that are isolated inside the web browser,
console websites are accessed directly from the shell, and thus
can be easily integrated with the system. Here arises the question:
what language could be used as the gluing language for the console services?
What features should posses a language, to be used in this niche?
Perl 6 seems to be a good candidate.

Several of the aforementioned services, though originally written
in Python and Go, were rewritten in Perl 6, and are using Perl 6 now.
Perl 6 did not show any big advantages comparing to the original languages
on the server side (but no disadvantages whatsoever);
but because of its concise, powerful and highly flexible and customizable
syntax, it clearly has many advantages as the templating language
for the console oriented sites.

The question is, could Perl 6 become the main templating language
for the console sites? And if yes, what main obstacles will be possibly
faced on this way? Could the console services and the console services approach
could be somehow useful for the Perl 6 community?
Those are the question that will be covered in the talk.

Talk announce