If you want to have an idea of what makes Perl 6 compelling, check these slides that were submitted a few days ago, "Perl 6 for Mere Mortals" (which is also another talk at FOSDEM): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8953368</a><p>I hate to repeat a comment of mine, but for the sake of emphasizing just how different Perl 6 is, here's a version of Fibonacci in Perl 6:<p><pre><code> subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0;
proto fib (|) is cached returns NonNegativeInt {*}
multi fib (0) { 0 }
multi fib (1) { 1 }
multi fib (NonNegativeInt $n) { fib($n - 1) + fib($n - 2) }
say fib(100)
</code></pre>
Edit: Another good recent talk is "Adventures in Perl 6 Asynchrony," which shows off promise combinators, channels, and supplies: <a href="http://jnthn.net/papers/2014-yapceu-async.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://jnthn.net/papers/2014-yapceu-async.pdf</a>
The first line of code I ever wrote was in Basic. It was copying something in a book. Then I wrote routines on a Ti calculator for school. Then I found Perl. I felt all grown up! Maybe, just maybe I could be a "real" programmer. Thank you Perl.
I can't find it right now, but I like how this harks back to the original announcement that Perl 6 would be ready in time for Christmas—just with no commitment to <i>which</i> Christmas.
I hope Perl 6 has better runtime speed and memory efficiency because those are the only downsides of Perl 5. However I seriously doubt that will be the case. Perl 6 will most likely be more bloated and slow, but I very much hope that I'm wrong.<p>Just for reference my company's software is all built with Perl 5 and runs great. Most of the execution time is within the database calls so there is no impact from using Perl over a marginally faster runtime like Python or Java.
As I said over on perl.org:
From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I have been keenly looking forward to this for a long, long time.<p>I think there's a good chance that Perl6 will not only become 'relevant in the large', once again, but also, once again, be a driving force in the overall improvement of our industry.
Wow, pre-congratulations! Let's hope this inspires some renewal in the Perl community.<p>It never made any sense to me that some people would rather see Perl stagnate and die and complain from the peanut gallery than they would <i>help it move forward.</i>
"Perl 6 Developers will attempt to make a development release of Version 1.0"<p>We are upvoting non-news? It'll be a great announcement if they ship it, but it's just hype now. Also, consider all they are announcing is a version for developers.
I have a fondness for Perl 5, as it was the first general-use programming language in which I became proficient. But let's not kid ourselves: Perl 6 is the Half Life 3 of programming languages.