Perl 6 Released
Perl 6 sort of set itself up for a tremendous uphill battle. By taking so long to &quot;firm up&quot;, in terms of specification (or the test suite, in this case), while Perl 5 had a period of neglect, it lost a whole bunch of its early momentum to other languages. Sometimes, former Perl programmers have passed through two or three other languages as their &quot;primary&quot; language since they last called Perl home (I know there are several formerly reasonably well-known Perl folks who are more known now for their involvement in JavaScript, Go, or Haskell, or Rust, etc.).<p>It would take a ridiculously advanced language to counter that turning of the tides. Luckily (or, I guess, not due to luck but because Perl 6 developers realized they had to deliver something amazing to justify the time lost in the wilderness), Perl 6 is a ridiculously advanced language.<p>I haven&#x27;t started a new project in Perl in several years (though my primary projects, which have existed for 9-17 years, are in Perl), but I&#x27;m strongly considering making my next project a Perl 6 project. It looks like a really fun language. All the stuff I like about Perl, with almost none of the stuff I don&#x27;t, plus some advanced stuff that I don&#x27;t even know enough to know why I might want it. But, I know that Higher Order Perl for Perl 5 (which I actually read while I was mostly working in Python) was a lot of fun and made me a better programmer, so I assume Perl 6 and its new paradigms will be similarly eye-opening.