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The perl community have been searching for the best way to overcome the perception that "perl is dead". (The constant bickering that it isn't the case reminds me of the holy grail http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/quotes?qt0470614 )

They need to focus on "Where perl has been" while it has been out of the limelight because, believe me, perl still rocks for productivity and performance.

Moose has revolutionized the object system (a system that was so flexible that it just gave you the parts and said "go build it")

Perl::Critic has created a baseline which all production scripts should be above.

PSGI and plack have changed the way you build and deploy and perl webapps.

In fact, the perl community and the current stars of CPAN have come so far, and have had so much going on that I have difficulty keeping up with the massive strides they are taking, let alone summarize those changes here.




> The perl community have been searching for the best way to overcome the perception that "perl is dead"

Release. Perl. 6.


"perl6 is another language in the same family as perl5. It is not meant to replace or succeed perl5. They are incompatible yet complementary."

The success of perl 5 is in no way determined by perl 6. Perl 5 development continues unabated. As jrockway says here, "Think of Perl 6 as Perl 5's Clojure".

Though my personal opinion is that the naming, and the confusion it creates, sucks and makes it really easy to think that perl (5) is dead because perl (6) hasn't been released yet.


It's a shame it got called Perl 6... Perl 5 has been cracking along and is by no means stale: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2010/04/ms...


Since the announcement of Perl 6 10 years ago, there have been fifteen stable releases of Perl 5.

There have been 31 releases of Rakudo Perl 6. Pugs had half a dozen.

What more do you want?


I want to be able to go to http://www.perl.org/get.html and see two links: download Perl 5.10.xxx, download Perl 6.x.


That would be a very good idea indeed.

In meantime for Rakudo Perl6 the direct link is: http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo


Some Perl 6 eBooks.



Thanks, I have this and it's great, but it'd be a bit nicer to have something a little more fleshed-out.

Looking forward to Learning Perl 6 when it starts to come along.


I'm talking to Pete Krawczyk about "Perl 6 for Perl 5 Programmers". Is that more what you have in mind?


I totally agree.

chromatic is currently writing a book called "Modern Perl", which teaches Perl the way we know it today, idiomatic, safe, structured Perl.

We just need more of such efforts.




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