Perl is an awesome tool to have under any developer's belt. It's likely that somewhere during the course of your development you'll need to hack together some one-off script to do something and Perl is likely the best tool for the job and will probably already be on your system. It's worth it to learn it for no other reason than it's probably the most productive tool for this kind of use-case available. It'll also give you some ideas for your main development languages in how things can work, and the "perl way" of doing things will bleed into that. You'll start to look at some of the overly complex line consuming ways of doing things like "reading in a text file to a string" as moronic and will start to write abstraction libraries to "fix" your other languages.

I know this is a limited view of Perl (and I'm a huge fan of Perl and using it in various key places has helped provide for a not-insignificant percent of my lifetime career earnings). But Perl 6 has effectively killed Perl.

It's a case of announcing too early and getting the entire community to back off from investment of resources into new Perl code when Perl 6 feels like it's been just around the corner for years.

Regardless of how you think of Perl 6 (an incremental upgrade or a major overhaul) the effect has been the same in almost every Perl shop I'm aware of. People backed off of new Perl 5 work, expecting it to stagnate (it didn't, but perceptions are hard to overcome) and waited and waited and waited for the version # in their perl -v to increment to 6.

Since they were going to switch to new code anyway, why not try out the half-dozen other languages that have soared in popularity since? And now you end up with the situation we have now.

Perl 6 also provided a long standing competition target for other languages to hit. It allowed other languages to figure out what Perl 6 was and wasn't going to bring to the table and hit the kinds of things that people really needed.

My ultimate opinion on 6 is that it's a huge effort/a major rewrite, for some rather incremental changes, without addressing long standing issues with Perl for large-scale development work. There's some really cool stuff in Perl 6, built in grammars are potentially amazing, but I'm not sure a 14 year wait (and counting) was worth it (and yes, I'm aware there are some implementations available, but until perl6 is a default command from the cli in any major *nix distro it doesn't matter).