[...]
I was there at the workshop too. You cannot count me in into being biased
against Perl 6. Only biased that it takes so long :-).
I know, and there were some others (like Herbert aka lichtkind, who writes
and maintains the German Perl 6 wiki pages) with the same opinions.
But the general atmosphere there was rather anti Perl 6, and the recent
discussions on the wsinfo mailing lists show that all too clearly.
It's really not a surprise. Perl5 is not "broken": IMHO many Perl5 programmers just
wanted some "little" (erm...) things like a less hacky OO implementation, better function
parameters and types, things like that. Perl6 promised these and much-much more, so people were
happy. There were news, ideas, Parrot hacking, etc... and people got bored. Basically nothing
happend for *years*. That is: many things happened, there is a nice specification now, brilliant
features, etc., you all know - but for Average Perl Joe, there is just nothing there. Average Perl
Joe needs this:
perl6 hello_world.pl
That's why I am rooting for rakudo: there is progress, or so I figure, and I can "ln
-s rakudo perl6" anytime :) Once you can point people to some targzipped source or
an RPM or something like that, and 10 minutes later they can indeed write the above line,
they will not be anti-Perl6 anymore. (I mean if they will be anti-Perl6 after that, then
we can just close this list and everyone can just go home.)
- Fagzal
