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What is Perl 6?
chromatic writes "Perl.com has a new article entitled What is Perl 6?. It analyzes the changes to the language in light of the good and bad points of Perl 5 and provides new information about the current state of the project: Perl 6 exists, you can write code in it today, and it's more consistent and easier to use than Perl 5."
What makes Perl strong, in my opinion, is the community's interest in maintaining a large and well-tested library of useful code in CPAN. Without CPAN, it's not clear that Perl would be as alive and healthy as it is today.
What Perl 6 offers is a rejuvenation of the language. Perl 5 still works great (better than ever due to new efforts to stamp out even the most obscure bugs) but this new revision is attracting some *really* smart people who are bringing interesting new ideas to the language. Audrey Tang and Luke Palmer come to mind right away.
My greatest hope, however, is not that a revitalized Perl will squash the other dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, PHP, ECMAScript, etc) but will instead bring them into a state of interoperability. I really, really want Parrot to succeed so well that the other languages decide to target it as a backend so I can trivially call Python or C libraries from Perl and vice versa.
People in the mid-1990s spoke of "overnight obsolescence", that Perl 6 would replace everything in a few weeks, and that you had better learn a new programming language every month. Over 10 years later, perl 6 is still in beta mode.