Hacker News takes that excitement and beats it into a nasty pulp on the floor.
Perl was my first language after QBASIC and a failed attempt at C. I thought it was super cool.
I love how it's optimized for being awesome instead of pandering to dumbass lazy coworkers who won't RTFM.
You're as much a part of HN as anyone else is, and tons of people here like Perl 6. That's presumably why stories about it such as this one get upvoted so highly.
Instead of dissing the community and adding to the negativity, it would be better to ignore it (which is hard, I know) and share some things about what you like so much.
Larry Wall gave a state of the onion speech about Perl as a "postmodern" language... which means something like, its guiding principles aren't only classical or modernist... it doesn't just aim for simplicity, purity, elegance, unity, etc... instead, it includes some very different values, like plurality, camp, fun, "just weird enough"-ness, "ha ha only serious"... some quotes:
http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
> I combined these cool features [from all kinds of other languages] in a way that makes sense to me as a postmodern linguist, not in a way that makes sense to the typical Modernistic computer scientist. Recall that the essence of Modernism is to take one cool idea and drive it into the ground.
> Well...Perl does one thing, and does it well. What it does well is to integrate all its features into one language. More importantly, it does this without making them all look like each other. Ducts shouldn't look like girders, and girders shouldn't look like ducts. Neither of those should look like water pipes, and it's really important that water pipes not look like sewer pipes. Or smell like sewer pipes. Modernism says that we should make all these things look the same (and preferably invisible). Postmodernism says it's okay for them to stick out, and to look different, because a duct ought to look like a duct, and a sewer pipe ought to look like a sewer pipe, and hammer ought to look like a hammer, and a telephone ought to look like either a telephone, or a Star Trek communicator.
> How does Perl put the focus onto the creativity of the programmer? Very simple. Perl is humble. It doesn't try to tell the programmer how to program. It lets the programmer decide what rules today, and what sucks. It doesn't have any theoretical axes to grind. And where it has theoretical axes, it doesn't grind them. Perl doesn't have any agenda at all, other than to be maximally useful to the maximal number of people. To be the duct tape of the Internet, and of everything else. You've heard the joke, I'm sure. How is duct tape like the Force? It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
> Let me state my beliefs about this in the strongest possible way. The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.
I love this attitude, and I think it's very hackeresque, so yeah, it's nice to see it upvoted and discussed on Hacker News.
I now consider Perl, and in particular Perl 6, as a language to learn ideas and concepts from. This slide deck shows me TIMTOWDI is not dead :) Perl does not shy in taking concepts made popular by other languages (Lazy lists from Haskell, "Hyper operators" from F#, channels from Go...) or inventing its own. It makes it a complicated mess, but also a fantastic source to learn about different paradigms and ideas.
I am eagerly waiting for a Perl 6 version of Programming Perl now, given how influential the third edition has been on me 15 years ago.