It's interesting how much negativity Perl 6 (or Perl, in general) generates, and how dismissive folks are of it's usefulness. The fact is that Perl is used extr

It's interesting how much negativity Perl 6 (or Perl, in general) generates, and how dismissive folks are of it's usefulness. The fact is that Perl is used extremely widely in a huge variety of roles. New projects are being launched in Perl (DuckDuckGo is a relatively recent thing that has been very successful, but there are many others), and a lot of very smart people work in Perl, both 5 and 6. If Perl isn't your bag, or Perl 6 is taking too long to be "finished" for you to want to use it, that's fine. There are hundreds of languages to choose from. I understand the frustration of longtime Perl developers; Perl 6 is the Perl developer vanguard seemingly turning their backs on "pragmatic" and running somewhat haphazardly toward the theoretical and (very far) forward looking (Perl 6 contains many more novel concepts than a lot of newer languages, such as Go). Could it, should it, have been done differently? Incrementally, with real-world testing for each new feature? Probably. Hindsight is 20/20. Is it a victim of second system effect? Possibly, we won't know until it hits some reasonable levels of production; right now it's still quite academic. Hubris is one of the Perl virtues, and it may have led to "perfect is the enemy of the good" winning out on more decisions than it should have. But, Perl 5 is a great language today, certainly a match for Python or Ruby for conciseness, performance, capability, etc. And a vastly better language than Perl 5 was 14 years ago. Perl lost the popular mindshare war..but, it still helps people build a lot of cool software in a lot of fields. Regardless of whether you'll use Perl 6, I'd love it if people here at HN would actually take a look at the novel ideas contained therein, rather than focusing on the superficial "it's late and I don't like it". There are concepts in Perl 6 that could improve your favorite language, and might alter the way you think about solving problems. If only you'd check it out. I'd wager most of you have read a bit about Haskell or Go or Erlang or Scala, without ever seriously intending to develop in it. I would suggest the same approach to Perl 6.