Articles which critique Perl as a whole by focusing on Perl 6 always strike me as a bit strange. As someone who works professionally with Perl every day, and starts several new projects using Moose-centric modern Perl techniques every year, the amount of time I or any of my colleagues spend thinking about Perl 6 is negligible.

The modern Perl movement, as far as I can tell, arose in part from Perl hackers who started to treat the wandering Perl 6 project — rife with neat ideas, if not with release engineering — as a skunkworks for Perl 5 extensions. In the gap between the middle-aughts and 2014 that this writer waves away with “is anyone still paying attention?” due to no Perl 6 release, the active Perl world adopted Moose, and many Perl-based Moose-driven technologies — Catalyst, DBIC, and so on.

These technologies, and the communities around them, have thrived on their own ever since. Nowadays when I think about Perl 6, it is often because I am at a Perl conference and Larry Wall is literally at the podium talking about it and I am like “Well. You go, Larry Wall.”

Perl really has reinvented itself in the last handful of years, at least in the eyes of those who make a living inventing new things with it. I can’t call this writer wrong — their perspective is their own. I suppose I can only learn to appreciate the notion that, to hackerly folks who aren’t as ensconced within the modern Perl community as I, the language is this thing from the 1990s that kicked the bucket through one bad decision in the summer of 2000, leaving behind acres of legacy code that’s still being scraped away.

To be fair: this indeed describes a lot of what I am hired to do. It’s just that I replace it all with newer and better Perl…