Would you say that people interested in languages should first look at certain "mainstream" languages Scheme/Racket, Common Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, Smalltalk, and Prolog, before looking at less-mainstream ones?
The above are all pretty cool though and each (as Larry Wall would put it) are the perfect examples of modernism. Each one takes a single idea to a fault.
Lisp => lists, Haskell => functions, Scheme => lists and recursion, Prolog => logic, Smalltalk => objects, Forth => concatenative and extreme minimalism, and APL => arrays.
Most post-modern languages combine many of the above in more practical and less elegant ways. Python is OO at heart, but can be written in a functional style, and can do array programming with Numpy.
So there is value (I think) to looking back at those languages from an educational point of view even if you're not using them in your personal projects or production.
The more novel ones that the author posted are probably also educational in their own way, but probably don't ram just one idea home. I think we're mostly past that now as Wall has stated. Perl6 might not run very fast or be very mature or popular, but it is a very interesting language that does a good job showing the post modern system. It pulls what the language designers felt were the best features from all the past languages (Perl5, Python, APL, Haskell, Smalltalk, Awk, Java, C#...etc).
Perl is an interesting language (and I defended Perl's merits in a language forum within the last year [1]). But people who've mostly done Perl for a long time might want to question cute sayings about other languages, and discover that, today, for example, the evolution of Scheme (especially Racket) has different ways of doing those best features from other languages that you list for Perl6.
[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/racket-users@googlegroups.com/m...
Take it with a grain of salt of course. Smalltalk is amazing, but the way you store code in an image isn't for s everyone.
I don't understand your last paragraph...can you please elaborate? What cute sayings are you referring to?
I agree about Prolog being logic-only. (Though it was once included as the query language of the complex data model of a commercial CAD-like system I worked on.)
Now Scheme (not lists and recursion to a fault) and other languages have logic programming as library or language extension: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniKanren
Incidentally, I don't want to sound dismissmive Prolog. It's worth learning a bit, such as with now-free books like: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-prolog