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Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

Modern scripting languages with... parametric polymorphism, built-in parallelism/concurrency, grammars, constraint-based multiple dispatch, etc.?

Yes, it will be very important to build up a Perl 6 community and an ecosystem of libraries. That being said, if you want to talk about modern scripting languages, Perl 6 seems like a good choice. Ok, to be fair to functional programmers a lot of these things are old features. But for the mainstream scripting languages, these are really new and powerful tools -- tools worth learning.

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Modern scripting languages with... parametric polymorphism, built-in parallelism/concurrency, grammars, constraint-based multiple dispatch, etc.?

Not everyone thinks that ticking off a list of feature checkboxes satisfies the most important adoption criteria.

True, but at the same time If I'm writing a code base that will likely have a >5 year life. I'd rather write it in a feature rich backwards compatible language. Else you are left with a Python 3 like scenario where you will have to undergo a decade plus migration path just to get a few improvements over a for loop and a print statement.

If I'm writing a code base that will likely have a >5 year life

... then don't write it in a language with negligible documentation, negligible tooling, barely-there library support, nearly zero users, and a roadmap based on the promise that, after almost fifteen years of working on the "It'll be ready when it's ready!" principle, sufficient volunteer mindset will change to "Let's ship a production-ready release to meet a hard deadline!"

I can't seem to reply to chromatic, but my point here was to address one of the parent post's specific criticisms, that of being "modern".

At least here on HN, rising languages such as Go, Scala, Elixir, and Clojure offer many of these features to help address developers' pain points. The authors of Go have themselves expressed surprise that their real audience ended up being disaffected Python programmers.

If we want to talk about modern languages we have to of course talk about their features. There's more to a language than features, but there was once a time when none of the above languages had much of an ecosystem or community. Rather, they all offer something compelling, such as type safety in Scala, concurrency in Elixir, etc. I just wanted to touch upon how Perl 6 offers many of these things.

I just wanted to touch upon how Perl 6 offers many of these things.

Sure, but in the world where I write software, my teams need code with a working ecosystem of documentation, tooling, libraries, trained or trainable developers, deployment and monitoring, and stability. I can get that from Go, Scala, and Clojure (haven't looked at Elixir).

Looking at P6's laundry list of features may be interesting from a language geek perspective, but it doesn't help me solve real problems for the foreseeable future, and there are plenty of interesting languages further ahead in the queue of things to learn.

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