but where does Perl really shine these days? That goes equally for the more conventional Perl 5 as well as the newer Perl 6.
It seems that nobody has really answered this question with respect to Perl 6. Let me try to give a few very brief answers on that part of the question.
Perl 6 has these to offer:
- It is a clean, modern, multi-paradigm language; it offers procedural, object-oriented and functional methodologies;
- Runtime optimization of hot code path;
- Malleable language, with the possibility to define functions, operators, traits and data types (adding a new operator is as simple as writing a subroutine);
- Improved, cleaner (and composable) regexes and built-in grammars (Perl 6 programs are compiled using a Perl 6 grammar);
- Lazy evaluation and infinite lists;
- Very powerful and high-level concepts for concurrency, parallelism and asynchronism for optimal use of multicore or multi-CPU architectures;
- Gradual typing, function signatures (including positional and named parameters), optional argument type-checking and subroutine multiple dispatch (based on signatures);
- a very powerful object model, with classes, roles, inheritance, subtyping, code reuse, introspection capabilities and meta-object programming;
- Powerful metaoperators and hyperoperators for applying code to lists of items;
- Unmatched unicode support;
- excellent interoperatibility with other languages such as Perl 5 (making it possible to use Perl 5 CPAN modules), Python and C (and others);
