Perl6 for Mortals

horos1 writes: "Hey all, I just ran across an article over at O'Reilly - Perl 6: Not Just For Damians which covers a lot of the negative commentary posted by slashdot on perl6 'featureitis'. Very interesting read, and IMO makes a hell of a lot of sense."

Comments

Messing things up or using Perl for what it fits

[Florian]

It's not only the Perl6 code examples which look scary, most Perl code that uses advanced/obscure features already does. I am a Perl coder, but I have a hard time reading much Perl5 code out there. Perl6 seems to make things worse.

The bottom line is that Perl is simply not the right tool for general programming purposes. I only use Perl as what it was originally intended to be - a "practical extraction and report generation language" that excels at scanning and computing huge amounts of text, as an integrated, improved replacement of the classical shell/sed/awk/grep etc. toolchain. Perl code can be readable and maintainable if it's written in C style and deliberately excludes the more esoteric features of the language. For anything else, and any "serious" - i.e. complex - programming, pick C/C++ or Python. It is no contradiction for me to concede this and still be a Perl afficionado.