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Comment by chromatic | Hacker News Reader

In my case, I find the Moose ecosystem much preferable to almost any other OO system I've used. Better multidispatch would put Moose over the top.

The last time I looked at Python 3, Perl still had much better Unicode support. In particular, grapheme support in regexes, built-in casefolding, and easy normalization made a 100+ country project much easier.

The stability of the language, core libraries, and CPAN modules across major releases really helps with maintenance. Python's 2/3 break was a bummer for a lot of people for a long time that I'm glad to have (mostly) avoided.

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Generally, dealing with data in multiple encodings is far more pleasant in Perl (or at least less unpleasant). I came back to Perl for this very reason when I had to write a script that pulled data from our Active Directory (unicode), our ERP system's database (Latin-1) and a bunch of text files (CP1252), merge it and render it into a HTML file or an Excel sheet (unicode). I tried using Python, but I quickly gave up in frustration.

What's your take on Perl6?

And do you plan to update the book to cover Perl6 some time in the future?

I have no plans to use P6. It's probably years away from having the ecosystem sufficient to support what I personally want.

I have no plans to update the book to cover P6; I think it does what it needs to do as it is now.

I'd bet Perl6 ecosystem will evolve very fast, I don't think you will need to wait several years

Anything that evolves fast also will have stability issues. Part of the draw of CPAN is the stability that comes from mature codebases.

I hope so. It's pretty bare at the moment, but it shouldn't take too much to get it to where, say, Go-lang was when people started to adopt it in earnest.

Won't Perl6 make the book redundant, I mean the whole reason we needed a Modern Perl book was because there was an old and crufty way of writing Perl5...but Perl6 ditched all that baggage so the only way to write Perl6 will be comparable to Perl5's "modern Perl" paradigm?

Modern Perl book was first released a few years before P6, which isn't even released yet. The companies that currently use Perl (at $work, even) are not going to switch to P6 any time soon, but can, and do benefit from the more recent best practices using Perl 5.

So I guess Perl's 5/6 break was also something of a bummer, huh?

I look at it in two ways.

First, Perl is installed on millions of machines by default, with full access to the CPAN--still one of the largest repositories of freely available libraries, with Perl's backwards compatibility and testing offering a lot of stability. If P6 comes out and succeeds, it'll still be quite a while before it can offer anything like that.

Second, I've given away electronic versions of the book for five years. It's not about the money or the job prospects for me. I figure the book's helped more people than I can count, so why not continue?

I figure the book's helped more people than I can count, so why not continue?

It's one of the finest programming books out there, about any language. And your work is very much appreciated. (We've never met, so I hope you don't mind me saying).

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