A decade ago Audrey Tang started the Pugs project to implement Perl 6 in Haskell and declared that Perl 6 was optimized for fun: -Ofun.
Game designers know what -Ofun looks like – it’s when players find themselves engrossed in their game, time flies and they experience flow. The art of great game design is balancing the player’s increasing ability with the challenge of the game. Sometimes it’s a bumpy ride!
Flow can happen when programming too: when you’re free from distraction, and the challenge you’re facing is not too easy, not too hard and you’re making positive progress.
Audrey’s invitation to new Perl 6 contributors to have ‘the appropriate amount of fun’ encouraged them to step forward and pick their place on this challenge/ability curve.
The challenge of designing and implementing Perl 6 has presented some scary technical dragons! Fortunately some of the most able programmers stepped forward to hack them down to size.
Over the past decade, it has been a joy to regularly read the #perl6 IRC logs and watch this process unfold. Despite the naysayers, #perl6 has remained a positive, productive place – the propensity for -Ofun is part of the DNA of Perl 6.
Camelia, the Perl 6 butterfly logo, helps sum this up. Camelia includes a reference to a ‘camel’ in her name, however, unlike a camel she doesn’t smell or spit. Flow requires a positive mindset. Camelia is a licence to have -Ofun – not the frivolous, Christmas cracker type, but the deeply productive, enjoyable and enduring type.
The Christmas release is a turning point in the whirlpool of Perl 6 development. The -Ofun will now freely flow outwards to new programmers.
Perl 6, with its emphasis on whipupitude and expressivity, makes it ideally suited to finding flow while programming.
If you haven’t unwrapped Perl 6 yet, this Christmas is the perfect time. You can download Perl 6 here and remember to have an appropriate amount of fun!
Raku Advent Calendar (2009-2019) 
“…Over the past decade, it has been a joy to regularly read the #perl6 IRC logs and watch this process unfold.”
I agree.
“… At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly….
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation …” from ‘The journey of the Magi”, TS Eliot.
The journey toward a useful language and a usable compiler is approaching an end, but for many it must have seemed a bit like that.
Thank you for bearing if for us.