The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for fifteen years.

As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present , for example.

I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.

> I just don't see why that means people will use it.

I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations.

> The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!

Perl is still among the top 10 languages, according to TIOBE. Even if we discount that index, other indices have it in at least the top fifteen.

https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages

I know literally hundreds of Perl developers in London alone. CPAN gets > 1,000 uploads a month. There have been regular releases that add features for years. The OO system provided by Moose puts most languages to shame... You have some odd definition of dormant.

I don't know, maybe because people like change and/or want to just try something new.

I came into programming little too late to even consider perl5. It's just something I've read through as part of setting up irssi script(s).

To me Perl6 seems fun based on the few things I've read and I don't see any reason not to give it a go. Sure I won't be using it in any "production" build anytime soon, but hey maybe its setup beats the hassle that ruby/rvm brings with it and maybe it's more fun than python.