I honestly did not expect to see the day Perl 6 gets finished. This must have been one of the most difficult - if not the most difficult - births in the history of programming languages.
At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used to like it so much.
So far I have not looked into Perl 6 seriously, because I did not see the point to do so before it was finished. Guess I know now what I'll be doing this Christmas. :)
Also, you gotta love Larry for quotes like this one: "This is why we say all languages are religious dialects of Perl 6..."
If you haven't had the time to learn the transition from Python 2 to 3, don't expect to find time to transition from Perl 5 to 6. Perl 6 is orders of magnitude more different from Perl 5 than Python 3 is from Python 2.
Perl 6 is not different, its a new language. You don't transition from Perl 5 to Perl 6. You learn Perl 6 as a new language and use it.
That's completely different compared to the case of Python, where Python 3 is a continuation from Python 2. But breaks backwards compatibility with the entire ecosystem. Bulk of the language remains same, you are migrating non backwards compatible parts.
You can build Perl6 and try it right now if you want, see my [early Perl 6](http://g14n.info/2015/03/early-perl6/) article for detailed building instructions.
Tiny correction: I heard it as "all languages are really just dialects of Perl 6," which makes a bit more sense in context. Either way it's a cute Wall witticism, of which there were many that night. Word has it that there will be a video in a couple of weeks, at which point you can judge for yourself!
There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases. Something as simple as a print of a string can be a minefield depending on what is in those characters. And it's not like the old days where you could safely filter out all non-printable characters to avoid most problems. Have you considered how your formatting is going to look when people intersperse Right to Left words in your output for example?
The boilerplate on there is only a start. Any time you read or write a Unicode string, or do any manipulation of the string, you need to consider possible edge cases, and they can be nightmarish.
Consider something as simple as outputting zero padded numbers (so they form a nice column in the output), except that the numbers might not be Arabic, zero might not be 0, they might not be written in the direction you expect, and padding might not even make sense. This is how you go crazy.
"At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3),"
At work, I have been using Perl 5 increasingly often over the past two years, mainly because handling unicode in Python 2 is not a lot of fun (and I still haven't come around to learning Python 3), and I have rediscovered why I used to like it so much.
So far I have not looked into Perl 6 seriously, because I did not see the point to do so before it was finished. Guess I know now what I'll be doing this Christmas. :)
Also, you gotta love Larry for quotes like this one: "This is why we say all languages are religious dialects of Perl 6..."