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I would move 4 up to 2. Every time I read an article about how cool Perl 6, I see the clever bits of syntax and think "WTF? I might enjoy playing with that for fun, but no way in hell would I use that for work."



I think this is what I admire about Perl 6, though also it is why it wasn't released as the successor to Perl 5 10 years ago.

It has some genuinely ambitious features, some things that (as someone who barely dabbles in new languages) that I haven't seen before, or combinations I hadn't seen.

Something novel instead of the umpteenth iteration of "x with a better type system" or "x without that pesky type system".


Yes, God bless them for making old Perl thirty years ago and popularizing the hash map as a core data type, and God bless them for making new Perl and whatever it brings. But I don't actually want to use either old or new Perl. :-)


The language geek part of me loves Perl. The business part of me would never let it be used for production code. Too much business risk to tolerate.


Counterpoint: this is why almost all business code lacks quality.

(To be clear: not because people aren't writing Perl, but because we tend to reflexively reject any technology that people are passionate about because "risk". But the risk of writing trash code that nobody ever could be passionate about is less visible. Also: I'm not saying there's an easy solution to this problem.)


Would you let JavaScript be used in production code? Because it is used and it's a mess.




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