I've been writing Perl every day, at work and at home, since 1993, ranging from mission critical operational components in the USAF, to automation that produced many 9's of network availability in a 'fortune 10' giant, to innovative operational management and process systems in a Silicon Valley (kind of) startup, to some pretty interesting stuff at my current company (SAP).<p>Perl 5 has certainly paid the bills. I have taught it to hot-shot C programmers and mainframe Cobol programmers alike in a community college.<p>Perl 5, by any modern standard, is, at best, a 'quaint' language.<p>Perl 6 is literally everything I wanted Perl 5 to be. The incremental data typing is very exciting. The regular syntax is going to make it even easier to teach. And there are so many other well considered and awesome features.<p>And I just get giddy when I think of the amazing things that really smart people are going to make with Perl 6. It's powerful from the top of its head to the bottom of its feet. And I think that it's going to be a very fast language too.<p>Thank you, Perl. Thanks to the many people who have made it possible. May my 13+ years of high hopes not be in vain!
If this is true, I'm incredibly excited. Perl is like a girl I used to love, broke up with, but never got over. I'm eager to start hacking on Perl 6 code, but don't want to put the time in dealing with preproduction versions of the language.<p>Very exciting.
Compiler feature matrix: <a href="http://perl6.org/compilers/features" rel="nofollow">http://perl6.org/compilers/features</a> Note that there is also a JVM target. This is exciting!
IIRC, this was a premature claim that has been written without any consulting of the actual Perl 6 community:<p><a href="http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218" rel="nofollow">http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218</a>
Unfortunately I cannot recommend the parrot backend for production use yet. We recently found a serious GC bug which is reproducible under very tight memory constraints, such as my mips box with 256MB RAM or with very big perl6 modules.<p>I'm working on it for a week already and cannot promise to be finished until Jan 31, 2015.<p>But the other 2 backends, jvm and moar, are doing fine.
I would like Perl to be the Perfect Extended Ruby Language. Sometime ago, there was a post from some Perl people about using Scala for the next Perl. Today Haskell, Clojure, Julia, Scala, Ruby and Lisp (batteries provided by quicklisp) are very big contenders.<p>Perl has cpan but I think the Perl community is really small, the great exodus happened long ago. Perl can make you feel as a real hacker, also J, but cryptic syntaxes is no longer buying you anything.<p>How can anyone seriously take any credibility to a calendar when Perl 6 has been delayed for ever.<p>Perl 6 is not the gift that Perl 5 was hoping to receive, Perl 6 is a modest advance not a revolution.<p>Today, now, we need much more. I wish Perl 6 the best, but I doesn't believe it will gets much traction.<p>Edited: Grammar. Summary: Too little, too late, there is no longer confidence.
A yapc europe talk mentions even more features:<p><a href="http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704" rel="nofollow">http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704</a>
As a related preview, Larry's keynote for the Austrian Perl Workshop last month:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y</a><p>(He mostly talks about his travels.)
After a quick look, Perl 6 still looks like $#%&@ to me. I don't see why anyone would bother.<p>When Python 3 came around, I thought it was a good idea and that everyone would want to migrate as soon as possible. What we got instead is 3 more parallel installs of language versions. Beside Py-2.7 (which will apparently never go away), you will need Py-3.3, 3.4 AND 3.5 because every project wants a different one. Why would anyone want the same drama with Perl?
What's supposed to be so great about Perl 6? I associate Perl with inscrutable cat-walked-on-the-keyboard programs and little else. Can someone in the know explain?
To me Perl is the monk's language. Not very friendly monks either. Solitary monks, except when they're talking about the virtues of Perl with each other. Except within intentional cloisters, it's not a good language to use for largescale or outward looking projects.
Does it still matter? My last line of Perl at work was back in 2005.<p>Since then, our clients have been using Python, Groovy and Powershell code for the same set of tasks.