I've never been a real Perl hacker, more of an admirer from afar. I mention that because I'm pretty close to the ideal "objective observer" that chromatic mentions.<p>dskoll certainly has valid concerns, but he turns into a real asshole as the thread continues:<p><i>I believe the improvements in speed and memory required to make Perl 6 competitive with Perl 5 are unprecedented in the history of computer science.</i><p>This is a ridiculous statement, of course things have been optimized by 95% before. Given the specific explanations given by the devs about the wholly unoptimized state of the project along with planned optimizations, it seems well within the realm of possibility.<p>I'm not sure what the chip on this guys shoulder is, but it sounds like he just wants perl5. He gives no consideration for the innovation and creativity behind perl6. If he doesn't give a shit about all the advanced features then stick with perl5 for god's sake, it's well proven and it's not going <i>anywhere</i>. But to argue ad nauseam about the impossibility of an "adequate" optimization from a totally ignorant position is pretty offensive.
This is also thoroughly debunked in another article posted here an hour ago or so:<p><a href="http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/07/an-accurate-comparison-of-perl-5-and-rakudo-star.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2010/07/an-accurate-compar...</a><p>Comes across to me like chicken-little syndrome.
The time is ripe for the next "big" language + framework to come on the scene. I predict it will be a compiled language with rapid compilation and advanced debugging/runtime monkeypatching, such that most of the advantages of dynamic languages will be subsumed. It will also support some advanced way to handle concurrency.
the comments are the most interesting part of this. original poster makes lots of assumptions, many of which are challenged by people who know the raduko code.
This reminds me of a lot of the "discussion" surrounding the Mozilla project back in the pre 1.0 days.<p>Non Project Member makes a decent point about performance, but does so in an incredibly presumptuous, entitled, non-helpful way.<p>Project Members make a lot noise and had waves about pre-production, non-optimized versions, etc., but never come out and say "Yes, version n+1 of our project will most likely use more ram and run slower on the same hardware as version N of our project"