I'm not against Perl or its evolution, but I don't see the point to learn this today when you have so many better scripting language alternatives with established community and rich libraries available.
Yes, it will be very important to build up a Perl 6 community and an ecosystem of libraries. That being said, if you want to talk about modern scripting languages, Perl 6 seems like a good choice. Ok, to be fair to functional programmers a lot of these things are old features. But for the mainstream scripting languages, these are really new and powerful tools -- tools worth learning.
Not everyone thinks that ticking off a list of feature checkboxes satisfies the most important adoption criteria.
At least here on HN, rising languages such as Go, Scala, Elixir, and Clojure offer many of these features to help address developers' pain points. The authors of Go have themselves expressed surprise that their real audience ended up being disaffected Python programmers.
If we want to talk about modern languages we have to of course talk about their features. There's more to a language than features, but there was once a time when none of the above languages had much of an ecosystem or community. Rather, they all offer something compelling, such as type safety in Scala, concurrency in Elixir, etc. I just wanted to touch upon how Perl 6 offers many of these things.
Sure, but in the world where I write software, my teams need code with a working ecosystem of documentation, tooling, libraries, trained or trainable developers, deployment and monitoring, and stability. I can get that from Go, Scala, and Clojure (haven't looked at Elixir).
Looking at P6's laundry list of features may be interesting from a language geek perspective, but it doesn't help me solve real problems for the foreseeable future, and there are plenty of interesting languages further ahead in the queue of things to learn.
Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl".
"Most" of exactly WHICH languages are you claiming were modeled on Perl?
>Perl is a language that is still ahead of its time.
Perl's time was 15 years ago.
>"Also, Perl's library system, CPAN, is far more comprehensive than many languages."
A library and a language are apples and oranges. Python's library ecosystem is more comprehensive than Perl's language. Because most any language minus all of its libraries is less "comprehensive" than another language's libraries, simply because most mature library ecosystems are much more massive than the language itself.
Even if you compare apples and apples then oranges with oranges, Perl is a terrible language compared to most other languages, and most of CPAN is terrible outdated crap compared to other language's libraries. Python, Ruby, Java and JavaScript all have much richer and more up-to-date library ecosystems than CPAN.
>"By the way, Python is a great language, except for all the tabbing nonsense."
Is the worst thing you can say about Python that it forces you to indent your code? Then I'd hate to see the haphazardly indented code you write in Perl. Good programmers don't find that to be a problem, because they indent their code properly anyway, and Python simply lets you do that without inserting a lot of punctuation. But inserting lots of punctuation is what it's all about with Perl, isn't it?
That's an unduly simplistic argument. "Indentation that looks clean" and "Indentation that fulfils Python's specific needs" are not the same: one is a superset of the other. This means that enforcing the latter is in fact an extra burden and a loss flexibility. Whether the burden is less than having to write braces all the time comes down to personal taste, but to pretend that it does not exist is dishonest.
In any case I could get used to the significant indentation. What actually repels me the most from Python is the lack of non-broken lexical scoping, which - together with the "only one expression per lambda" limitation - makes closure based programming solutions awkward and hard to get right in Python. Which is unfortunate because I personally really like those kinds of solutions...
The ironic thing is, that this situation leads many Python programmers to believe that closures are inherently complicated/difficult/bug-prone, and sneer at languages which promote them heavily as "not newbie friendly".
To get back on the thread's topic, Perl 6 is one of those languages where function and variable handling is built on proper lexical scoping, and closures are everywhere. Even regexes are closures, in the sense that they are treated as first-class code objects (that just happen to be written in a different syntax), and if a regex uses variables from other Perl 6 scopes it closes over them.
Maybe I'm the only one who feels that way, but that kind of thing excites me in a way that Python never could.
But to each their own!
>Having a regexp library is hardly "modeling a language on Perl".
I don't know about most, but both PHP and Ruby were heavily influenced by Perl. If you've used both, this should be apparent, if not, you can easily find references on record to the effect. The original statement may have been a bit hyperbolic, but in context and with constraints something similar isn't unwarranted. E.g. "Perl was very influential to many of the most popular scripting languages today."
That doesn't even make sense.
