Congratulations Larry and the Perl 6 community! From what little I've played around with the language in the past, I really like it, and I'm glad the community can put the "still in development" talking point behind it. Also, one of my favorite things about Perl 6 is that the Rakudo interpreter prints some of the nicest error messages I've ever seen. It actually offers suggested solutions, and it points out Perl 5->6…
As far as I understand, Rakudo is a compiler, not an interpreter. It compiles perl 6 source files into bytecode that is executed by a VM.
I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages. At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used…
Oh, it didn't get finished. Perl 6 is just getting started!
There is nothing stopping a resurgence of Perl, if it's an order of magnitude better than competitors. If the combination of modern Perl techniques and the language make it a good enough fit for a new interesting framework or tool, then we might all be writing Perl again in a few years.
Just needs to get more jobs posted for it first. Going back to the original comment: >What would you build in Perl today that you wouldn't build in another language instead? You could turn it around too: what could you build in another language that you couldn't build in Perl? Well, nothing really. It's a matter of taste, and I think what continues to set Perl apart is its syntax, which could be really good and reada…
I didn't say could or couldn't, we're talking about turing equivalent languages of course so that question is meaningless, I said would. You can code anything you want in native assembly, or in brainfuck even. But why would you? If you have some impressionable new college grad just getting into the industry how would you convince them to use Perl to build things instead of any other option?
I love Perl [I have been to perl monger meetings and I had to look up how to 'unshift' in python today]. But Python3 is mostly just Python2 with a print function instead of a print keyword. It is occasionally non-trivial to port large existing code bases from Python2 to Python3, but it is practically always trivial for a Python2 programmer to write new code in Python3. I hope Perl 6 will get its own camel book!
Perl was the first programming language I ever used, and i think 6 was being worked on even then. I've moved on to ruby as my goto, but my (limited) memories of perl are fond, and I'm happy to see its still moving forward.
It was not my first language but the memories are fond. It just sat so well on my head by making things you thought of possible with little resistance. Impedance mismatch was minimized. Hard to explain. Became a master text wrangling language by making regex a first class citizen.