I use Perl to "get shit done" (GSD) it's not sexy, it's not my main job, hell, it's barely reusable. But using Perl has been the difference between failure/late delivery and success/early delivery/under-budget more times than I can even remember.
As late as the end of last year I has hacking Perl 5 code as a side project to GSD and took a project that went from not-existing because the scope was unfeasible for the next 3 calendar years to existing and producing measurable results 3 weeks later. That work got me a promotion and then a new better job making more money (and not doing Perl work) and overall joy and happiness because I was the guy that GSD (and Perl made that happen).
You are probably thinking of Ruby. Wait, Haskell. Hold up, Erlang. Sorry, Node.js.
You're just trolling and clearly haven't got a clue.
Object system with MOP, subtyping, pattern-matching, new human readable “regexpes“, grammars etc.
And for the first time in humankind it chars in string are counted by not bytes, not 2-bytes, not codepoints, not another shit, but Unicode graphemes! 2013!
What is the point in spending time on any thing new?
>>given it's undeniably unambiguously spectacularly awful track record,
How many inventions throughout history fall into these category? Airplanes, Rockets?
>>and the fact that there are so many other wonderful and better languages available to spend your time learning.
So this will be one of them.
>>There's nothing in Perl 6 that makes it any more powerful (and definitely not any more easy to learn and use and maintain) than any other language.
Seriously?
Have you even read the specification? If Perl 6 sees the light of the day in say an year, it will be the equivalent of what current day 10 languages together would achieve in 10 years from now.
>>There are no jobs programming Perl 6, and there never will be.
Which is true for any new language ever.