[creer]

> Perl 6 would have had to be a better Perl 5 and a better Python 2 to win.

Don't sell perl 6 short. I am using perl 6 for significant projects now (after a career of perl 5) - and it's fundamentally different. I describe it as perl to the power of perl.

For me, expressiveness is fundamental. And perl 6 gives me that.

Perl 6 is simply suffering from python being everywhere. And perl 5 was always easy to lampoon as "line noise". It's a stupid quip, but it leaves a mark on new programmers. You don't even need to read the course and you can already have an opinion. Stupid kills? And then perl 6 doubled down on that anyway. Then I doubled down on that ALSO and I get to use (carefully chosen) unicode symbols in my line noise :-) So there.

[rdtsc]

> For me, expressiveness is fundamental. And perl 6 gives me that.

I saw Larry Wall at one of the conferences. He talked a about Perl 6 how it was progressing and such (it was before it was renamed) and year, expressiveness what stuck out. It certainly has lots of nice features, too. But at least for me, I realized with Perl 5 I wasn't smart enough for it. I would be lured by the clever short expressions and then sometimes later look back and had no idea what I wrote.

Larry is a great person, btw. During lunch at the conference sat at his table and he was very approachable and warm. I don't remember what we talked about exactly just that it I liked how down to earth and nice he was.

[creer]

> But at least for me, I realized with Perl 5 I wasn't smart enough for it.

I feel like you but I love it: I am not limited by the language. Not by perl 5 and not by perl 6: When I am willing, I can dig deeper and find more to work with. When I am willing I can try and follow presentations or books by Damian Conway, Mark Jason Dominus, etc and I can get new ideas and inspiration. I can always learn more about this fundamental tool that's at the center of what I build. The tool challenges me in a good way. It does not slow me down. It does not limit me. If anything in there is going to limit me, it's going to be my own brain.

And perl does that without tripping me. Because in perl, the intuitive way is one that's not likely to hurt you. While if you know better, you can work with the more elaborate, deeper features.

I hate it when I have to use a language that constantly limits me. It has happened. I am not always free to choose the programming language or platform. For some, it's so frustrating that I charge more. And it's still frustrating.

[ZyanWu]

Since you're actively using it - how's performance in Perl 6? Are the rumors that it's slower true or exaggerated?

[creer]

I have exactly zero functions that are written in both. So comparison is just intuitive:

My current projects make extensive use of numerical functions AND of regexes and grammars. Both used extensively. I am very satisfied with the performance on both aspects. It does the job. And there is no question that for the regexes and grammars, what I have goes FAR beyond what I ever dared to run in perl 5. Performance is good, including on this stuff that I feel would have been pushing perl 5.

Still, I write for expressiveness. It matters to me how fast I can write. And I am NOT satisfied with "searching through the doc". That's the main sore point for me. The doc is very good but online-first and local... eventually. So I am stuck using an online search function... which constantly falls short.