Myths about Perl 6
Honestly, I&#x27;ve considered getting back into Perl 6. Python is so wretchedly regressive and I&#x27;m just not a fan of the decisions made in Ruby (although I confess whenever I need to slice up a string or something in a way I don&#x27;t immediately know in Bash it&#x27;s a sbcl or irb shell I call out to).<p>Perl 6&#x27;s philosophy of <i>redistributing</i> complexity and providing more than one notation because different notations have different effective use cases has always deeply appealed to me. Not just because I think it&#x27;s true (most folks think their language makes things simply only because a library writer has done a huge sum of work to make specialists feel awesome rather than actually face the reality of the library), but because I think that it leads to a more honest organizational approach to software by allowing different folks to focus on different areas within the same code-base and share the load more horizontally as opposed to hierarchically.<p>On a more personal level, I really miss the days when I was excited about scripting languages. To some extent, I am less excited because languages like Haskell and Clojure have come into their own and are so expressive you often don&#x27;t need a scripting language to make progress fast in domains they have good libraries for. But still, the days when I felt like scripting languages were trying to actually address the machine-cycle-human-effort tradeoff is past us. Ruby and Javascript have largely stopped innovating radically, with only incremental changes since 2012 that I see. Python will forever squat on its 2008-style mentality that all programming is terrible, and Lua is constrained by its design space to have an extremely minimalist feature set. Languages like Pike are largely gone, and it sorta feels like only a few Lisps like PLT Scheme have kept pushing forward on these ideas.<p>I guess I&#x27;m also sad that other folks seem to have such radical double standards for Perl 6 in the comments here. The only way it seems it <i>could</i> succeed is if it was faster than Lua while being more featureful than Ruby while also being exactly as regressive as Python. But none of the languages mentioned here would actually meet any one of those criterion outside of itself (even if it were possible to mix them).