There are already a couple of working compilers for ‘Perl 6’...

There are several incomplete implementations in development.

‘Perl 6’ is being written for free

Ian Hague donated $200,000 to the Perl Foundation three and a half years ago. $100k went to funding Perl 6 development and $100k was nominally seed funding to attract other donations. Besides that, Vienna.pm has funded some Perl 6 development.

... by dozens if not hundreds of volunteers.

You can probably count core contributors on both hands with fingers left over. Both Rakudo and Niezca have a bus number of about two.

No one is suggesting you wait for ‘Perl 6’...

I think a reasonable person might object to the categorization of any Perl 6 implementation being "usable" right now for anything more than a toy project. Almost 16 months after the first Rakudo Star release, I don't find Rakudo usable, and I have commit access to the full stack of the project, so if there's an early adopter archetype, I likely fit.

I need a working Perl6 DBI and web framework before I can really switch over. Most of what I do with Perl5 isn't calculating Fibbonaci sequences or making fancy class hierarchies; I read files, process data from one format into another format, insert it into and read it back out of a database, display it on the web and so on.

The ability to do all of those things in more concise, elegant ways is what makes Perl6 attractive - but first things first, we need the basics. CPAN6. lib-www-perl6, DBI6, Plack6, etc.

I know Mr. Tim Bunce is working on a JDBC port to Perl6 (great idea) and that's a great start. I know that there has been a lot of discussion about CPAN6 (authorities, etc). Maybe it's time to do some googling on the subject.

I'm not involved enough to have an opinion about when/if Perl 6 will be ready for everyday use. But my impression from looking at some examples is that it's practically a different language. The jump from 4 to 5 included some major changes, but the language still looked pretty much the same, as I recall. Perl 6 code that I've seen doesn't look that much like Perl 5 code, except for retaining the sigils (to be fair, that may be because the examples tend to focus on things Perl 5 doesn't have). So I get the feeling that using it will mean learning a new language, to a large extent, rather than simply adding some new features to the one I already know.

There's nothing wrong with that -- the designers should do what they want, and !omelette unless $eggs->scrambled() and all that. But I don't know if I'll be any more likely to switch to Perl 6 than to switch to Ruby (to mention another language I don't know which is said to combine a lot of Perlish features with Smalltalk/Lisp ideas). I may very well switch to Perl 6 eventually and decide it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it certainly won't be an automatic thing.

Aaron B.
My Woefully Neglected Blog, where I occasionally mention Perl.

I have similar thoughs. Will i be forced to ditch all i wrote the last decade in Perl 5?

Or will i be able to use my existing code on Perl6, writing new code in 6 and slowly turn existing 5-code into 6 whenever i have the need to rewrite/re-engineer one of the "old" modules anyway.

If i have the start from scratch anyway, i might as well choose an older language with a bigger userbase and a bigger asset of preexisting open source code. It just would get me working productive a lot faster.

On the other hand, if i could do a gradual switch from Perl 5 to Perl 6, i would "waste" a lot less time, could reuse whatever i had slaved and brainstormed over the last ten years and have the huge CPAN assets at my fingertips whenever i have to build something in a hurry...

Don't use '#ff0000':
use Acme::AutoColor; my $redcolor = RED();
All colors subject to change without notice.

How is it possible that, start up's run by college kids with funding around quarter of $200,000 build stuff and a business around them. So that not only do they build the product completely but also get money for further work.

From what I make of this, either we are not managing money and people/resources well. Or just that we are too much into this socialism thing?

I still believe we can pull this thing off, Its possible. There will be contributors. And people will contribute provided we build something that works well for most common definition of production use. There would not have been Perl 5 or its contributors if Larry hadn't done the base work.

In order for people to buy that Perl 6 has future. They first need to be shown that there is something workable now as per most commonly accepted definitions of Production ready.

In the UK, roughly 80% of all startups fail. Yes, four out of five. The venture capitalists know that, and will not look at businesses that will wash their faces. They will invest only if they see a prospect of a return well over five times their investment. If they can't get that, they can't cover the losses of the four other businesses that will fail.

This was what went wrong in the DotCom bubble. VCs live by diversifying their risks, and with a new market sector opening up, they wanted to diversify into it. The common mistake was to concentrate on the diversification and not on the potential return. In fairness, because it was an unknown sector, it was difficult to estimate the returns accurately. But it wasn't impossible, and the premia paid for a lot of startups - Freeserve as a ghastly example - were way beyond the bounds of common sense. Then, when the 80% failed, the returns on investment of the successes were not adequate to cover the losses.

Of course, not every investment made by VCs is a startup, and when you are dealing with a proven management team in a proven industry, the probabilities change. But some VCs concentrate on startups.

The startups that are reported are the ones that do something spectacular. Either they fail in a way that causes general calamity or they make a fortune. The sort of business you describe in your post is the 20% success. But the owners will generally be very dissatisfied, feeling that they are "working for the VC, not themselves". Of course they are. The VC has to cover his losses.

I am not a VC and have never worked for one, but I have shares in 3i.

Regards,

John Davies

Update: fixed minor typo

How is it possible that, start up's run by college kids with funding around quarter of $200,000 build stuff and a business around them. So that not only do they build the product completely but also get money for further work.

Business is a business, business is hard, luck , timing and connections play a huge part

Start-up means peanuts for promise of future pay -- success not guaranteed

Also, building an app/website is a million times simpler than building a programming language, or a virtual machine for said language to run-on, or maintaining 20 years of backwards compatibility across many OS ....

Try running gitstats on perl.git

There are several incomplete implementations in development.

I mentioned they were feature incomplete, but as far as I know they do compile and run. I could be wrong, I have only begun to scratch the surface of Perl6 with the aim of having aXML ready for it when it comes out... it appears I have quite some time :)

Ian Hague donated $200,000

I wasn't aware of that fact.

You can probably count core contributors on both hands with fingers left over.

I was basing that estimate on the experience of having visited the Perl6 irc channel where I found dozens of connected usernames and presumed them to be the subset of people who happened to be online at the same time as me. It looked very much like the Perl6 community is active and sizeable.

I think a reasonable...

Oh I heartily agree, as far as I can tell it's not yet complete and the performance is currently terrible. Having said that, it's still a long way from true to say that Perl6 is a pipedream that will never materialise!