Many proxies suffer from a set of problems relating to specificity, applicability, and how much you can infer from quantitative data. Specificity, in that you

Many proxies suffer from a set of problems relating to specificity, applicability, and how much you can infer from quantitative data. Specificity, in that you are attempting to model one specific question with another, which might not even indirectly answer the question. You make an inference on this, and this inference could be quite wrong. Applicability ... are you or the proxy really measuring what you intend? Is the proxy applicable as a metric? I won't fisk this post. I will point out that people have been beating on Perl for a long time (all versions), as a "dead horse". It decidedly isn't, from my vantage point in a number of areas. Cool, it is not. Hip, it is not. More importantly, dead, it is not. Perl6 is interesting, I've not done much there yet, though it looks like a great general purpose language.