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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else in Perl 5 land, having tried Perl 6, just not that interested?

Seems like a lot of trendy changes that weren't needed to the language. There are some great changes (especially in the OO realm), but also a lot of weak ones.

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Its like a trade off. While OO interests you a lot, there are a good deal of people who like functional stuff. Some people like both(See scala popularity these days). Some people want all of that with strong scripting support.

The design of Perl 6 is to ensure you can incrementally evolve the language to be whatever the trends are at that time.

Oh, I like the functional stuff too, but the regex changes and grammars and some of the operator overloading - I feel like I'm getting to a point with the functionality where Perl's syntax will start to get in the way, which is not the point of the language.

What happens in other parts of the code doesn't have the same impact on your code it does in Perl 5, though. In Perl 5 it's very easy to globally change the behaviour of code, while in Perl 6 it's a lot since harder since almost everything is lexically scoped.

I think Perl 5´s syntax got in the road too much for some people.

Well a lot of the normal stuff is still normal. But that's no fun to show off, so instead lots of Perl6 examples are full of edge cases. When I translated small examples from Perl5 to Perl6 I found them to be pretty similar, though with more obvious OO and cleaning some of the array/hashref sigils visuals.

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