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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.
As somebody who has used Perl since Perl 3, I've been following the Perl 6 disaster on and off since its very beginning around 15 years ago.
As somebody who also relished the fantastic Perl and CPAN communities of the 1990s, I'm sad to say that I've generally been quite ashamed of the Perl 6 community.
First and foremost is their inability to get anything done. Seriously! They've fucked around with so many incomplete implementations now that I've lost track. Rakudo is just the latest failure in a long string of Perl 6 failures.
Second is the way they've handled criticism of Perl 6. I see people on Reddit and HN make good points about how awfully Perl 6 has been handled, and these people are savagely downvoted by the Perl 6 community.
Third is the way they claim that Python 3 was a disaster, when the opposite is clearly true. Python 3 improved Python 2 in important ways, it's well supported by libraries, it sees frequent updates and improvements, and most importantly they've been able to deliver stable production-usable releases for years! Python 3 has been a resounding success in a fraction of the time it has taken Perl 6 to go absolutely nowhere.
Fourth is the way that Perl 6 isn't actually that much of an improvement over Perl 5, assuming that it actually is an improvement at all. This is difficult to evaluate because of the lack of reliable, complete implementations.
Fifth is the way that they've tarnished the reputation of Perl as a whole. Now when people hear the name "Perl" they think of Perl 6 and its 15 years of screwing up. They no longer thing of the scripting language that, while maybe not the prettiest, was damn expressive and very effective to use. "Perl", which once evoked a sense of pride in many people now evokes a sense of disappointment and shame.
Even if the language does turn out to be better than Perl 5, I don't think I'll even bother using it. I just don't want to have to deal with the people who make up its community!