Montezuma123

100 year language might be meant seriously by some people, but I meant it as something that has enough powerful concepts to stay relevant for a long time.

It harks back to Paul Graham's essay where he started off on Arclisp as a 100 year language and better designed lisp. Other priorities came up and it didn't really go anywhere besides maybe being used for this website. Hopefully Perl6 doesn't suffer a similar fate.

Learning Perl6. It will be the continuation of Learning Perl, but for Perl6 instead of Perl5 I think. My bet is they'll (last edition had 3 authors)continue to publish both as both languages will survive for a long time until Perl6 wins out. There's also the possibility Perl6 just never really takes off, but I hope not.

Brian D. Foy has a WordPress site up for it.

There is a perl6 intro website as well that is awesome.

I can't count the # of times a super helpful question was closed on StackOverflow for being "off topic" or being likely to cause a flame war. I do like Perl Monks, but wish the format was a little different UI wise. Def still usable though.

Ah, yes you are correct. Thanks for pointing out some of the finer historical notes! I bet there are plenty of people here that would be impressed to know how much P6 has to do with Haskell. I think the general impression isn't one of lots of advanced ideas but Hey Perl finally got a decent object system which is kinda sad lol.

Brian D Foy has a WordPress site up for Learning Perl6 with some pretty random blog articles. I'd say he's 1-2 years from publishing which is both frustrating and good. The language should be solid by then.

I will say that I started using Perl5 recently (big python fan). I expected everything to be crusty and bad. CPAN worked great, and the doc...my GOSH the doc is sooo good. It is everywhere. In my command-line, gazzillions of websites. I forgot what it was like to not be dependent on StackOverflow.

Haskell had a big influence on Perl6. Lazy evaluation is built in to the language just like Haskell. If you look at the bottom of the Perl6 website you'll see the Fibonacci sequence using a lazy infinite list.

Fun fact, one of the original Perl6 implementations was done in Haskell (the parrot VM I think).

Answering your question:

I haven't heard of anything in PROD yet (there is a QUORA question on this), but I know there are several Perl shops that would jump on this when it's fully ready. You can use it today for most things (assuming hard performance isn't needed). When the optimizations and JIT are complete, you'll have a very fast OO language with optional types. My intended use cases are for pretty much anything that doesn't need a GUI like a .NET desktop app. I have a LOT of data at work and look forward to using the Grammar functionality to build useful and beautiful parsing code.

I believe Perl6 is bootstrapped by a subsection of Perl6 called NQP (not quite perl)which is written in C.

Damian Conway (Perl5 frequent contributor) is a professor who knows and has taught Lisp classes. He made a good point that although Lisp is powerful in it's own way, you don't get a lot of information by simply glancing at some code. With sigils and other known operators, Perl gives the reader a lot of information as long as it isn't abused.

Yea I think the JVM backend was broken recently by a patch (if I remember correctly), but should be fixed soon if not already. I'm surprised it actually works so well when MoarVM isn't 100% done.

I assume the JVM would allow you to use Java libraries as well?

I for one am extremely excited for Perl6's ecosystem to grow, documentation to increase, and for the performance optimizations to reach maturity.

Perl5 has raw text processing power, but Perl6 kicks that into overdrive with a much cleaner language (clean and powerful OO with a MOP), with cool goodies from a dozen other languages. I think this may be the first decent contender for the 100 year language if it becomes production worthy.