You wont get many opinions of people's experience of Perl6 from Hacker News. Just a lot of rage and assumptions it's somehow just like Perl5, which it's not. Th

You wont get many opinions of people's experience of Perl6 from Hacker News. Just a lot of rage and assumptions it's somehow just like Perl5, which it's not. There are only a few of us (tens, maybe a hundred very quiet people) actually writing it daily. With no official "released" 6.0.0 version it's not supported that well by Linux distros yet either. Like if you install Rakudo on Debian stable right now it would be about two years out of date iirc. In the last two years a custom Perl6 VM was written with a JIT compiler and tonnes of concurrency stuff was added! You can however easily install it yourself and keep up to date with rakudobrew http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/day-2-rakudobrew/ http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2014/12/02/day-2-rakudobrew... My $0.02 is you'd mostly want to learn Perl6 if you were after something like Ruby but perhaps with more room to express yourself and form a community and build new technologies. At least I really love the language and find it very expressive and intuitive to use and it has a lot of features useful for doing Bioinformatics built in (something I'm going to add to the P6 advent calendar on the 15th Dec). The extra level of detail ten years of design puts into a language like all the funky features working together and being consistent helps a lot. So much of the cooler expressive/functional stuff in Python feels out of place like lambda and list comprehensions. Maybe I'm wrong but I wouldn't write anything /that/ complicated or important using Python lambda or list comprehensions. They just don't play that well with the surrounding code you will have to write in a different style. I can't attest to Ruby since I don't know it well. I felt it was quite close to Perl and I'd be better placed learning Python instead, especially for a job writing code that wasn't for the web.