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Perl 6 Gets Beta Compiler, Modules and an Advent Calendar (thenewstack.io)
An anonymous reader writes: A "useful and usable distribution of Perl 6" was released Saturday, a new beta version of the Rakudo compiler to support the coming production release this Christmas. And there's already 467 Perl 6 modules on the new archive at proto.perl6.org (though Perl 6 will also be able to load modules written in other languages). "Perl has a huge community of avid users that continues to thrive in spite of detractors," says one developer, pointing to new applications for big data, in a new article reporting that over one million people have downloaded ActivePerl's own Perl distribution just in 2015. And this week also saw the release of two new "Advent Calendars" of programming tips, one for Perl 5 and one for Perl 6.
That's always a sign of a healthy and thriving development language.
I've used Perl since the first release, gotten pretty good at it 5-6 times over the years, and loved it for it's capabilities. But I've also become disgusted with the whole idea of There's More Than One Way to Do It. What TMTOWTDI means in the real world is that, if you have to maintain someone else's perl script, you're in for a world of hurt unless you're a guru at it.
I don't want to bash perl, it was a great solution back in the day. But nowadays I tend to solve perl problems in either Python or Java (don't get me started on Java, please...). They may be a bit more inconvenient and awkward for some tasks, but when push comes to shove and I have to modify a script I've never seen before I don't have to pull 3 books off the shelf and thumb through them wondering "WTF?"