Re: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018

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);

Comment on Re: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018

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Re^2: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018 by pwagyi (Monk) on Apr 15, 2018 at 14:25 UTC
Perl6 looks like a language that has almost everything (ruby, python have), functional/OOP, meta programming, etc. I really wish Perl 6 takes off.	[reply]
Re^2: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018 by Crosis (Beadle) on Apr 15, 2018 at 06:36 UTC
I've seen what can be done with the inline modules even in Perl 5. It gives me something to think about.	[reply]
Re^3: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018 by syphilis (Archbishop) on Apr 15, 2018 at 09:27 UTC
I've seen what can be done with the inline modules even in Perl 5 XS and Inline::C (which is essentially the same) are things that I find very attractive about perl 5, as accessing C routines by writing perl programs is far more appealing than accessing C routines by writing C programs. Of course, other languages also provide interfaces to C but I don't know how they compare with perl's C interface as I've not yet felt the need to investigate the alternatives. Cheers, Rob	[reply]
Re^4: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018 by Crosis (Beadle) on Apr 15, 2018 at 09:45 UTC
That I'm aware of, there's Cython and there's also a Scheme dialect called Chicken that compiles to C.	[reply]
Re^2: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018 by Jenda (Abbot) on Apr 23, 2018 at 13:48 UTC
We apparently use a different definition of the word clean. While still being way slower than anything else. In combination with it's "clean" syntax, deceptively at the first glance kinda similar to another, older and well known language, this is bound to lead to impossible to decipher code. While being an overkill most of the time and another ad hoc change from things people know, but with \d still matching insanely way too much. Yeah, that's nice. If done right. Aaaand ... the design is finally stable and ... erm ... implemented? mkay And there's maybe five people that understand it all. With lovely line noisy syntax Jenda Enoch was right! Enjoy the last years of Rome.	[reply]