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Comment by signa11 | Hacker News Reader

> The issue is, why would anyone want to move from Ruby/Python/Js to Perl in 2016...

actually not quite. given the plethora of libraries/frameworks etc. for perl-5, why would perl-5 programmers move to perl-6 ?

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> actually not quite. given the plethora of libraries/frameworks etc. for perl-5, why would perl-5 programmers move to perl-6 ?

I'm a Perl 5 programmer. Perl 6 is a more perly Perl. I can use my Perl 5 modules if I really want, but I can write better specified, safer and more logical code. Just having simple functions like 'whenever' makes developing fun and easy.

Please see http://jnthn.net/papers/2015-yapcasia-concurrency.pdf for context

My intuition is that current users of Perl 5 probably fall largely into two camps: using it because it looks like the best tool for the job or using it because it is the language of their soul.

People in the first group would switch if Perl6 looks like a better tool. Short of revelation the second group won't. Hardcore Perl programmers have had a long time to think about Perl 6 and come to their conclusions. It's not a community where evangelism is likely to make a difference these days. I don't think the Perl community is like the Python community for cultural reasons that stem from their histories.

Perl 5's killer app is CPAN. It will be a looooong time before Perl 6 can compete.

I'm contributing toward language integration bindings, hoping to make it convenient and socially acceptable to call out to Perl 5, Python, Ruby, ... so that we will have (a subset of) CPAN, pypy, Rubygems, and so on. You can do this from any language really -- it is just binding to the c lib of the guest language.

It kinda makes me sad that the instinct for most of these things is to port a lib from language to language to language... when does it end?! I never want anyone to write pyplot again -- let's just call pyplot from ALL the languages thanks to the magic that is a little c library called libpython.

You seem to be under the impression that Perl 6 can't use Perl 5 CPAN modules.

https://github.com/niner/Inline-Perl5

What advantage does running Perl 5 code in the Perl 6 runtime give you? Is it enough to warrant switching?

Depending on how you look at it, the advantage is either all of the Perl 5 ecosystem plus whatever Perl 6 brings to the table, or the lack of a disadvantage through not having a large module ecosystem, depending on how charitable you want to be.

Not to mention, you also have Inline::Python[1], and conceivably any other runtimes they want to embed. I think it would be interesting to see what you get by taking the best of class in each ecosystem and using them. It may or may not scale well due to data marshalling, but it's definitely something new (at least the ease of it is) and, IMO, worth looking into.

1: https://github.com/niner/Inline-Python/

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