I talked to some of the TPF people at Booking.com's donation event and they expressed desires to have more paid-for developers working on the Perl 5 core, and they're really gearing up as an organization for making that happen.
One thing of note for those unfamiliar with the Perl community: Notice how both of these big grants are earmarked for Perl 5 development, not Perl 6 development.
By now Perl 6 is viewed as best an interesting research project by organizations using Perl 5 in production.
I don't mean that as a comment to detract away from what the Perl 6 developers are doing, but to point out that it's a very different pattern than what's happening with the next generation of Python, Ruby, PHP etc. runtimes.
1. http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-1...
As a member of an organization using Perl 5 (among many other languages), I should probably speak up. Though we haven't donated many thousands to TPF, it may be worth noting that with a minimal set of modules, similar stability and performance guarantee within an order of magnitude Perl 5's, we would be using Perl 6 without question. (With that alone it wouldn't replace all of our Perl 5 code, but we would be using more Perl overall as a result.) In fact Niecza is temptingly close to that status at the moment if you factor interop into the equation.
We have a highly polyglot environment, so introducing a new language to that is something that can be taken in stride. I assume a lot of Perl 6 reluctance comes from unfamiliarity, but for us it's more a matter of overall reliability. I find Perl 6 is better able to represent program logic, and I am sure having it in our environment would improve prototyping and maintenance considerably.
Perl5 -> Perl6 is not a natural progression. It's such a radically different language that going to say Python or Ruby is nearly as similar a change. Why's it obvious to you guys?
On the other hand, for everything a little bit "web" related, you can find a stack load of easy to use PHP code. They are also usually "pure" PHP, making them easy to integrate in your own framework/system. Usually the PHP community at large is very fast at getting things done in a simple way (sometimes a bit ugly, but this is improving drastically).
Note: This is of course a bit of a caricature what I wrote, but in essence, you cannot ignore the community/ecosystem supporting your language.
Unfortunately Perl doesn't have a Sugar Daddy :( However it does have a few benevolent Uncles :)
Here's the breakdown of the last 12 months contributions...
$10,000 Jun 2011 Vienna.pm
$10,000 Jul 2011 Booking.com
$10,000 Jul 2011 cPanel
€100,000 Jan 2012 Booking.com
$100,000 Jan 2012 Craigslist
I'm not deeply invovled the p5 developers, but it doesn't look like these grant create envy in other contributors, judging from the development speed.
[Jim Buckmaster] added, "It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it."
1] Learning Perl (6th Edition) is excellent for beginners.
2] Modern Perl (2nd Edition was just published; free ebook version should be out by next week) assumes a basic knowledge of both programming in general and of Perl in particular, but is well-written and very clear.
3] Programming Perl (the 4th Edition covering Perl 5.14 will be a huge update from 3rd Edition (published in 2000 for Perl 5.6!); should be published in February, according to O'Reilly) is the famous Camel book and the ultimate Perl reference.
The Perl Cookbook is a little outdated now, although it's not too bad and there is talk on the mailing lists of updating it. But it's not really aimed at learning Perl though.
As already mentioned, PerlMonks is also a great website to browse.
=)
(Best is probably to ask at PerlMonks.org what to read.)
Edit: My best advice for a newbie is to get the Cookbook after the first basics. The Perl one is really helpful.