Here's my thoughts on the matter…

Perl 6 is an amazing language. The implementation and libraries available so far still have a lot of room for improvement, but they've come a long way from where they were a few years ago.

The Perl 5 porters have been doing a fantastic job of keeping Perl 5 secure, usable, and relevant over the last few years through bug fixes and incremental improvements to the language. (Refaliasing and sub signatures are two huge recent wins.) If Perl 5 had been allowed to stagnate and die while Perl 6 was being prepared, Perl 6 would have nothing to inherit.

But Perl 5 won't still be relevant or interesting in a hundred years' time; Perl 6 just might be. If Perl wants to remain relevant in the long term, Perl 6 is necessary. In the short term, having a not-quite-ready interpreter branded as the successor for Perl 5 does seem like it may have done some damage to Perl's marketability, but in the long term, the Perl 6 effort is necessary for Perl's survival.

(Some would argue that Perl 6 isn't Perlish enough, and what survives from this won't really be Perl. But from my own experiements, Perl 6 mostly seems to add stuff to Perl. It takes very little away, and that which it does take away is stuff I won't miss. (Formats?) There are a few annoying fairly gratuitous syntax changes (the method invocation operator and changes to sigils spring to mind) but you can get used to those fairly quickly. With the exception of those annoying syntax changes, if you eschew the new features, it is possible to write a very Perl5ish dialect of Perl 6.)

toby döt ink

In reply to Re^10: The Future of Perl 5 by tobyink
in thread The Future of Perl 5 by Laurent_R

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