I like Perl 6 (P6). I would like Perl 5 folk pondering P5's internals or its future to properly investigate and understand P6's role.
> how about a Perl 5 interpreter for the JVM?
In the opening few minutes of Patrick Michaud's 2013 video "Perl on the JVM", he notes that Jesse Vincent suggested "Perl 6 is Perl's best (only?) hope for running on JVM/.NET".
> I really feel like the difficulty of working on the Perl 5 internals limits the language--and ultimately, will kill it.
There's been a serious effort to clean up the internals in recent years. But yeah, part of the point of P6 was to develop much better internals.
Rakudo and the NQP compiler toolchain are not only well designed but also almost entirely written in P6 code. (Counting NQP as P6.)
> attracting new blood, new developers, young teams of vocal and enthusiastic programmers... I just don't see that happening.
Even in the face of its disastrous reputation, P6 still manages to attract new blood. Aiui the guy who writes the P6 weekly news (http://p6weekly.wordpress.com/) contributed to the Python core before getting in to P6. This year I've seen smart kids visit #perl6 for the first time, chat knowledgeably about a lisp or ML, and start to contribute. Some well known P5 folk such as Nicholas Clark (one of the few folk ever paid by TPF to hack on the P5 internals) and lizmat have fully turned their focus toward P6 in the last year or so.
> I have yet to find another language that I love as much as Perl (and I wouldn't mind doing so, at this point).
What about hanging out on #perl6 for a while (prime time is about 8am thru 8pm EST, 7 days a week) to chat with folk and see what there is to see?
I hope I'm being helpful. There's definitely a glass half full / half empty dilemma with talking about P6.
Let me now include a standard caveat list I created last year in an attempt to ensure balance in the force:
"Perl 6 is not remotely as usable and useful as Perl 5; it has dozens of users, not millions; it is 100-1000x slower than Perl 5 for a lot of stuff; the P6 documentation is immature and incomplete; the spec has not reached 6.0.0; the Rakudo compiler has not fully implemented what's already in the spec; most of the concurrency and parallel implementation has only just begun; P6 can not currently use CPAN modules; Perl 6 has syntax and semantics that are not backwards compatible with Perl 5; Perl 6 culture is -Ofun which some think is incompatible with getting things done; some folk think that Perl 6 code looks like line noise... In summary, there are infinitely many things wrong with P6."
I hope that hasn't brought you down to earth with too big a bump.
> how about a Perl 5 interpreter for the JVM?
In the opening few minutes of Patrick Michaud's 2013 video "Perl on the JVM", he notes that Jesse Vincent suggested "Perl 6 is Perl's best (only?) hope for running on JVM/.NET".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgPh5Li3k4g
Have you read about FROGGS' v5?
http://usev5.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/here-implement-labels-...
> I really feel like the difficulty of working on the Perl 5 internals limits the language--and ultimately, will kill it.
There's been a serious effort to clean up the internals in recent years. But yeah, part of the point of P6 was to develop much better internals.
Rakudo and the NQP compiler toolchain are not only well designed but also almost entirely written in P6 code. (Counting NQP as P6.)
> attracting new blood, new developers, young teams of vocal and enthusiastic programmers... I just don't see that happening.
Even in the face of its disastrous reputation, P6 still manages to attract new blood. Aiui the guy who writes the P6 weekly news (http://p6weekly.wordpress.com/) contributed to the Python core before getting in to P6. This year I've seen smart kids visit #perl6 for the first time, chat knowledgeably about a lisp or ML, and start to contribute. Some well known P5 folk such as Nicholas Clark (one of the few folk ever paid by TPF to hack on the P5 internals) and lizmat have fully turned their focus toward P6 in the last year or so.
> I have yet to find another language that I love as much as Perl (and I wouldn't mind doing so, at this point).
What about hanging out on #perl6 for a while (prime time is about 8am thru 8pm EST, 7 days a week) to chat with folk and see what there is to see?
https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/perl6