You should not be thinking about Perl6. It's deeply interesting. It's moving forward well. It's not ready. So unless it's to satisfy curiosity or to contribute or to gamble on the future to get ahead of the curve, ignore it. Perl (5) is not going to disappear. Its releases have been like clockwork for years. It's as stable and useful as any language and likely to remain the leader in things like regular expressions and Unicode support. Perl6 will have nearly zero influence on Perl5 until and if it becomes stable, complete, and as fast. This is not going to happen next year or the year after and it may never happen at all.
Perl5 is a fantastic, vibrant language, with a rich ecosphere, actively moving forward and it will be for the foreseeable future. If you like it, jump back in with both feet.
Update: did not realize I'd klept "vibrant" from Corion. :P Regarding Python: the 2/3 split being installed and competing with shoddy include/discovery code on boxes in install scripts is what led me to wonder how anyone likes it at all. It's been nothing but a PITA to me and from an accidental user's perspective it seems like a hot mess full of bad practices and assumptions. Perl, Ruby, and Node.js toolchains have all been kinder and saner for me.
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\o,
well, Node.js ... I never liked server-side JavaScript. The thing that annoys me most with Python (any version) are the missing brackets. :-)
I do like Perl 5, always have, probably always will. I've just been out of the game for quite a while now. While the languae itself doesn't seem to have evolved much (although I still need to dig through the recent feature additions), Perl6 was not a subject when I last left Perl.
So, basically, Perl6 is "Perl 5+ in a VM"? (VMs are awful IMO.)
Regards and all that,
jkl
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So, basically, Perl6 is "Perl 5+ in a VM"?
No, really not. Perl 6 is really a different language, with a clear parenthood with Perl 5, but yet a different language, more expressive, more modern, with many new features, including a full-fledge object system, grammars, lazy lists and arrays, features from functional programming languages, etc. I think the comparison with C vs C++ made by another monk is quite illustrative of the difference between the languages.
Although I am very interested with Perl 6 and am trying to contribute to the Perl 6 community, I haven't coded anything really serious (i.e. production code) in Perl 6. For example, I'm not using Perl 6 for my job, whereas I am using Perl 5 almost everyday (and most of my days) at my job. I certainly don't see Perl 5 to vanish away in any foreseeable future.
As for the VM, this is not really the essence of Perl 6, it is just the current implementation that is using a VM. A future implementation might be entirely different.
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Perl6 has the potential to be amazing and could include cross-compilation and such. It's not baked yet. Pretend it doesn't exist. Serverside JS is a bigger threat to Perl than Perl6, Python, and Ruby combined; it's the only full-stack high-level language and its tools are constantly improving.
Perl5 has had various speed and minor feature enhancements in 10 years but the ecosphere/CPAN (especially web stuff) has changed dramatically in the last 10 years.
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