* Everyone I've encountered online who has used both Perl 5 and Perl 6 says that they like Perl 6 (the language) better.
* This first Rakudo Star release is not optimized at all, which is fine and not a surprise. Everyone by now should know that one of the golden rules is: "make it work, make right, then make it fast." Rakudo is (fwict) mostly still on the first step there.
* There are a large number of Perl 5 users who, years ago, got excited about Perl 6, and then eventually needed to get back to work with Perl 5 and subsequently went quiet on Perl 6. I think you're going to see more and more of these people getting re-interested in Perl 6.
* I keep hearing "Perl 5 isn't going anywhere". I think that's correct, however, that comment usually implies "it's not going to disappear tomorrow". I think it has a 2nd meaning, and that is: it's not going to continue to move forward very much now that Perl 6 is here.
* Perl 6 needs its own real forum. Perlmonks has a decidedly Perl 5 feel to it, and although #perl6 on irc is a friendly place, users need a regular online forum. Someone needs to just choose one, install it, pick a pretty theme, slap a Camelia logo on it, and get it running. Not a mailing list, not a google group, not irc, but an actual factual forum. It doesn't have to have karma or voting or a chatterbox right now, it just has to have a working forum.
* Go Offer Kaye! Keep those "Gentle Intro" blog posts coming. http://blogs.perl.org/users/offerkaye/2010/07/p6-gentle-intr... . Many new Perl 6 users will want to write in baby-Perl6, and little easy tutorials like these (and Szabgab's screencasts) are a great help.
Some good points there. Here is my POV on a couple of them:
Everyone I've encountered online who has used both Perl 5 and Perl 6 says that they like Perl 6 (the language) better.
My heart loves perl6 whereas my head prefers perl5 :) Fortunately the syntax and semantics between them are so close I don't think I'll ever have an issue switching between them (in fact this maybe become a good consultancy requirement, ie. job opportunity, for the future?).
re: future of perl5 - There is good momentum behind perl5 & CPAN at the moment that I doubt it will be deflected at all by perl6 for quite a while. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if perl6 draws a bigger attention from outside of the perl5 world.
Just built it on Snow Leopard (it's not on MacPorts yet). Sadly, there are a couple of independent documentation projects underway but no "official" docs. Since I have a day or two to spare, can anyone point me to a learning resource (Python/ObjC guy here)?
Check out the PDF of the draft of the Perl 6 book in the R * distribution (as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf or something similar).
The Perl 5 to 6 articles at http://perlgeek.de/en/article/5-to-6 are very helpful even if you aren't familiar with Perl 5. One thing to remember about them is that they describe Perl 6 as specified, regardless of whether any of the implementations fully support the relevant features.
The Perl 6 Advent Calendar from last Winter (http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/perl-6-advent-ca...) is more of a "Here are some really cool things about Perl 6" series of articles, but they are also pretty good reads for learning the language.
The Perl 6 design process began in the year 2000. Concurrency and parallelism (two separate issues) did not become all the rage until CPU's hit the performance wall and multicore became more popular, which was--I think--after 2005 or so.
* Everyone I've encountered online who has used both Perl 5 and Perl 6 says that they like Perl 6 (the language) better.
* This first Rakudo Star release is not optimized at all, which is fine and not a surprise. Everyone by now should know that one of the golden rules is: "make it work, make right, then make it fast." Rakudo is (fwict) mostly still on the first step there.
* There are a large number of Perl 5 users who, years ago, got excited about Perl 6, and then eventually needed to get back to work with Perl 5 and subsequently went quiet on Perl 6. I think you're going to see more and more of these people getting re-interested in Perl 6.
* I keep hearing "Perl 5 isn't going anywhere". I think that's correct, however, that comment usually implies "it's not going to disappear tomorrow". I think it has a 2nd meaning, and that is: it's not going to continue to move forward very much now that Perl 6 is here.
* Perl 6 needs its own real forum. Perlmonks has a decidedly Perl 5 feel to it, and although #perl6 on irc is a friendly place, users need a regular online forum. Someone needs to just choose one, install it, pick a pretty theme, slap a Camelia logo on it, and get it running. Not a mailing list, not a google group, not irc, but an actual factual forum. It doesn't have to have karma or voting or a chatterbox right now, it just has to have a working forum.
* Go Offer Kaye! Keep those "Gentle Intro" blog posts coming. http://blogs.perl.org/users/offerkaye/2010/07/p6-gentle-intr... . Many new Perl 6 users will want to write in baby-Perl6, and little easy tutorials like these (and Szabgab's screencasts) are a great help.