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I haven't tried Rakudo Perl yet but my impression is that Perl 6 and Parrot will enable many things to be possible.
For example with parrot (correct me if I'm wrong) you would be able to mix different libraries written in different languages together easily. And Perl 6 is intended to be more advanced and flexible than other languages for the next 20 or 30 years. So in that sense it is far premature to be writing anti-Perl things when the first public release for a wider audience to try Rakugo Perl has been announced.

It should be celebrated not dissed. Finally, in terms of lines of code and how freely creative one may be, and how fun it is to use, Perl beats Java and Perl 6 may turn out to be awesome, who knows? The stupidest post of all was by a self-described "pretty sharp computer scientist" who never read a single manual on the language and dove in to a big program without understanding it. I mean the guy didn't even know that $_ is the default input, i.e. the next line read from a file. I think this really tells on the current totally ungeeky, uncool, unintelligent, inexperienced status of the average Slashdot reader.

I've met some of the people building Perl 6. They are cool, intelligent, funny, altruistic, geeky, and having tons of fun at what they are doing. They've spent a long time on it and they've plundered the state of the art in language design to do it. They aren't insular or hating other languages, they love cool stuff like Haskell and Ruby. My impression is the language is totally customizable if you are smart enough too. If I had more free time I would be investigating all kinds of stuff like Erlang and Scala, dive deep into Perl 6, any language is going to stretch your mind.

Oh, sorry, is Python the last thing you will ever need to know? Hah. I bet Perl 6 and Parrot will be great and I hate to hear people say detrimental things about something like that which has plenty of promise. $Foo on you! The rest of us are applauding them for their magnificent achievement and ongoing dedication. Plainly enough, they are heroes and deserve medals of honor and knighthoods.

Perl has bytecode. Yes, it's experimental, but I've played with it and it works.

for the record, IE also supports VBScript and PerlScript. Maybe you should spend more time with IE.

Perl 5 isn't really bytecode at all. It basically just walks the parse tree directly.

Yeah, no, that's not actually true.

http://www.xav.com/perl/lib/B/Bytecode.html

You know what? I got in on this when it was first released, and a few weeks down the line, I'm not that impressed.

True, I didn't review every single aspect of the system, but from a cursory overview it just seems like a jazzed-up version of Analog, which most webhosts offer as standard built-in logfile assessment. It's filled with 'executive' displays so you can show your boss fancy pie charts and graphs with nice-looking displays, but if you really just need page stats there's many simpler ways (and unlimited in signups) to go about it, particularly without loading google's external JS into your site. I personally found AXS to be pretty straightforward but usable.

I didn't see that anyone gave you the full explanation here. What happens is during the compile pass (perl first does a parse/compile pass, then executes), it encounters the definition of sub DEBUG(). The closed parenthesis indicate that this sub will never accept any arguments -- not like a C prototype, more of a compiler hint. It effectively becomes a constant within this package that never needs to be written as DEBUG() because there is no ambiguity as to whether there are parameters. During the compile pass, it also sees that the return value of DEBUG will never change, and pretty much does an s/DEBUG/1/g or s/DEBUG/0/g to your code.

More explanation here: http://www.xav.com/perl/lib/Pod/perlsub.html#const ant%20functions

Combine that with perl's handling of logical operators, and it allows you to "short-circuit" the print statements when DEBUG evaluates to 0.

You paid 82k for a redundant 2 TB RAID 10 server? What were you thinking? I built a 1 TB RAID 5 Array out of 300 gig disks (with a hot spare to boot) for under two thousand dollars, and it can scale to 4 TB by just adding additional disks and controllers. The fact of the matter is, you can build rather large storage systems (10+ TB), with great redundancy provided you know what you are doing that will undercut anything any large data vendor has out there.

Take your car into the shop, spend $1000, 80% of which goes towards labor. Do it yourself will always be cheaper but there are times when you still should bring in the experts (like building a new engine from scratch, or replacing the one you had, unless you are REALLY talented).

Also, see:

http://www.xav.com/scripts/misc/1016.html
http://www.accs.com/p_and_p/TeraByte/
http://vtwug.w2k.vt.edu/pdf/chubtoad.pdf
http://www.phy.olemiss.edu/HEP/sanders_chep03.pdf
http://staff.chess.cornell.edu/~schuller/raid.html

Note: Many of these were done years ago and costs and software have only gone down and improved. I would strongly suggest to go the cheap way, which if done right would result in cost savings in the hundreds of thousands if not millions for this project.

You can get a lot done in Windows with VBA and calling on routines using OLE. It's evil evil stuff, but it works and doesn't take the brute-force sendkeys kind of route... that stuff is a hack.

Check out what the sick Perl bastards have been up to : http://www.xav.com/perl/faq/Windows/ActivePerl-Win faq12.html#use_ole

I've always had trouble finding good docs on this stuff when I try to take advantage of it.

I don't know if you'd consider using Perl, but I've had some good luck with the Fluid Dynamics Search Engine. By default it can search text and PDF documents, and after some work I was able to get it to search the text of Microsoft Word documents too.