Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Diederich | Hacker News Reader

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I've been writing Perl every day, at work and at home, since 1993, ranging from mission critical operational components in the USAF, to automation that produced many 9's of network availability in a 'fortune 10' giant, to innovative operational management and process systems in a Silicon Valley (kind of) startup, to some pretty interesting stuff at my current company (SAP).

Perl 5 has certainly paid the bills. I have taught it to hot-shot C programmers and mainframe Cobol programmers alike in a community college.

Perl 5, by any modern standard, is, at best, a 'quaint' language.

Perl 6 is literally everything I wanted Perl 5 to be. The incremental data typing is very exciting. The regular syntax is going to make it even easier to teach. And there are so many other well considered and awesome features.

And I just get giddy when I think of the amazing things that really smart people are going to make with Perl 6. It's powerful from the top of its head to the bottom of its feet. And I think that it's going to be a very fast language too.

Thank you, Perl. Thanks to the many people who have made it possible. May my 13+ years of high hopes not be in vain!

I haven't touched Perl in quite a long time. For the type of automation stuff you are doing, i'd likely use python or ruby, depending on the nature of the problem.

Would you say people like me should be looking hard at Perl 6? I'm curious what the benefits would be.

At least for the past decade or so, I would (roughly and humbly) put Ruby and Python on par with Perl 5 for the purposes of system administration, with a whole lot of pros, cons and caveats. Very roughly. It's just that, as a language, Perl has always resonated with me, even though I've rather enjoyed writing in both Ruby and Python.

Assuming you are akin to 'Jill Sysadmin' or 'Joe Devops', I would honestly say that Perl 6 won't be more compelling than Perl 5 for a while.

And, by the way, Perl 5 has grown enormously in the past 10 years. I would say that if you haven't taken a look in a while, give it another shake.

I honestly struggle to imagine the really cool things that will start to come out of Perl 6 acceleration. It has some really novel concurrency concepts, far more interesting than goroutines, for instance.

And once again, I believe Perl 6 will turn into a very fast language.

> And, by the way, Perl 5 has grown enormously in the past 10 years. I would say that if you haven't taken a look in a while, give it another shake.

this. I can hack a bit in Perl 5, but "modern Perl" is virtually a unique language that just so happens to be written using the same words I use. I haven't had a chance to really learn modern practices, I keep telling myself I'm going to sit down and do it, but I haven't had a chance. But what I've seen is really pretty different than what I grew up with.

It's pretty amazing.

I still find Perl is better for some tasks (over Python - I don't know Ruby). It has loads of syntactic sugar such as globbing files, backticks for executing system calls.

Are you aware of any Camel-or-higher level of book(s) in the works? for Perl 6 I mean....

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