From Babylon to Pascal with Perl 6

It's a powerful language that allows some fun syntax. I think it will make a mini-comeback when people rediscovered how much it does.

For someone who has never tried Perl I would suggest learning it and using it for scripting.

I use Perl at least once a week for regex. Occasionally I use it for extracting web pages or splitting columns or something like that. For my purposes, Perl 6 vs prior Perl does not influence functionality. If you write more complex programs I have heard/seen that there are more substantial changes.

Perl 6 a new Perl-ish language with grammars powerful enough to parse and run itself. You can use it to write FP or OOP or imperative or reactive code, or all of the above in the same program. Despite the sprawling feature set, there's a clearly defined specification, and it's written in the form of tests. Currently there's only one implementation that runs 6.d, but that implementation runs on MoarVM (C lang), the JVM, and (in progress) Javascript.

And of course the best thing that they fixed from Perl 5 is the community. If you have an interest in learning more about the language, come by on #perl6 on freenode and we'd be glad to help you out.

I've only dabbled with it a bit, but I think of it this way:

One could say that at its inception and heyday, Perl more or less defined what a "scripting" language could/should be, making things like string processing and list/dictionary handling very convenient, mixing multiple paradigms, and facilitating community modules. That certainly seemed to have influenced JS, Ruby, and Python (Perl's scripty siblings) but I think many people would say these are now considered better executions of those core ideas.

But are they really the apotheosis of this kind of language? How else could you grow/change a language like this in order to make it more convenient, powerful, or interesting? (Or less politely: what would make something as great as Ruby or Python look relatively blub-ish?)

I see Perl 6 as an answer to that question, perhaps in a similar way that one might say Rust answers that question for systems languages.

Insert grousing at the HN markup input and parser here

Yes.

Ugh, what a humorless bunch!