I don't know Perl 6. But here's the reasons why I've considered dusting off my Perl 5: - Subjective, but in my experience, the Perl community is more full of s

I don't know Perl 6. But here's the reasons why I've considered dusting off my Perl 5: - Subjective, but in my experience, the Perl community is more full of smart yet practical people than any other dynamic language community I've participated or dipped my toe in (and most popular static manifestly typed language communities to boot). I don't say this to trash Ruby or Python (or even JavaScript and PHP, which have plenty of smart users and participants); I just mean that I often learn more from engaging with the Perl folks. - Kindof a corollary, but Perl 5 seems one of the few places where industry's reflexive treadmill dash towards the newly-formed but usually isocapable turned into a careful reflection on using the existing power at hand wisely and the best marginal gains from key additional features. Place two jobs in front of me, one of them working on a new Go project, the other on a new Perl 5 project, my bet is going to be that the latter would be part of a more satisfying overall experience. Now, Perl 6, this is starting to look like a language where they are going to make a number of things easy that most programmers didn't even know were hard, a number of things possible that most programmers didn't even know were possible, where recent PL research is going to meet further practicality, where unicode might even actually be reasonably comfortable to work with.