The progress on Perl 5 has been remarkable too. Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken and spelunk through StackExchange for hours. Unicode just works most of the time. Useful new features appear in the language, even though you would rightfully expect it to be in maintenance mode.
Re:Perl 6 Optimism
by loggedinmyphone on Tuesday January 23, 2018 @11:45AM
(#16214920)
> Complex data structures no longer require you to wave a dead chicken
Do you have a reference on changes to data structure syntax in 5.x? Probably my biggest frustration was trying to use anything beyond a scalar list - it always ended up a mess of hashrefs.
Mostly it is deref operators being smarter now so you don't have to wrap everything in curly braces to get it to dereference properly.
> It's best to admit as soon as it's clear what's happening that you are doing something entirely new
Larry said something similar on day one.
> and let the old project live out its own lifecycle.
Larry did exactly that. It's still living out its own lifecycle and will for another N decades.
> re-using the name of a once-well-loved and established language is a bad move for both the old and the new versions.
I agree that this has likely turned out to be the case for Perl 6.
What I've heard about Perl 6 does sound intriguing, and probably a solid language platform does take a good decade-plus to get on solid footing. But re-using the name of a once-well-loved and established language is a bad move for both the old and the new versions.