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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

I've long since stopped using Perl so forgive my ignorance.. Is Perl 6 widely understood in that community to be a different language and not the evolution of Perl? That's what the discussion on this blog indicates. Is the Perl 6 language a dead end or are people enthusiastically working on using it for production systems? I truly don't mean this question as flamebait, I am curious what the consensus is in the Perl community.

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Is Perl 6 widely understood in that community to be a different language and not the evolution of Perl?

Yes, in part because it's taken so long and delivered so little and in part because Perl 5's core development picked back up again a few years ago (and the CPAN never stopped improving).

Is the Perl 6 language a dead end or are people enthusiastically working on using it for production systems?

The intent of the people working on it is to produce something which will eventually be usable for serious projects, but no one can give a good prediction as to when that will happen.

Given that specifications such as Unicode, Security and a Standard Library are examples of the Synopses still "TBD" after all these years, many Perl users will have retired from programming entirely before Camelia/Perl 6 is "of use." The fact that major Synopses such as these are left to the end is not necessarily reassuring either.

http://perlcabal.org/syn/

A few years ago, the next version of perl was going to be version 6. There were to be a lot of changes that I did not really like; I forget most of the details, now. I have not had any deep conversations about this with anyone, but I suspect that I was not alone in my opinion. So yes, I think most perl programmers have completely ignored the perl 6 proposal, and as a consequence, perl 6 simply hasn't happened.

As proposed, I would definitely consider perl 6 a different language, and if perl 5 were phased out, I would probably give up on perl and switch to python. As it happens, perl 5 is still around, and I still use it, and I had sort of forgotten about perl 6.

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