If there is anything that the open-source movement has taught us, it's that getting users actively involved in the development leads to better software. It also slows things down a bit when there are disagreements.

I think debate and discussion on the merits of Perl 6 is rather useful. I only hope that people don't get so mired in debate that progress is effectively halted, or that the core developers get fed up and stop listening.

As for the cited critique... Fish's critique comes of as whiny, but he does make some interesting points. I have some concerns about the significant changes to the language that will break Perl 5; I have a large quantity of deployed Perl5 code that will need to be maintained, and I worry that it will quickly become "legacy" code as Perl6 becomes the language that future programmers learn. There are, in fact, many changes to Perl6 that are (IMO) better than the Perl5 way -- but, they will cause problems for maintaining old Perl5 code.

I have to wonder why the Perl6 team has decided against including Perl5 backwards-support through a use pragma. How nice it would be to: 

sub old_perl5_style_code {
   use perl5;
   #code ...
}

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radiantmatrix
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In reply to Re: Perl 6 critique is a good thing by radiantmatrix
in thread Perl 6 critique is a good thing by Juerd

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