\o,

maybe this is not a good forum to ask this, but on reddit they were rather quiet ... :-)

I exclusively used Perl 5 and a bit of JavaScript and PHP for my first job, then I somehow focused on PHP completely and started to make money with it. Writing scripts in other languages was never a job choice for me, I just like to learn new things. (Although I guess that knowing more languages will highly increase my job chances anyway.) The occasional Perl here and there (a fun IRC bot in my spare time, a text parser for some of my colleagues at work) was never gone but I didn't invest much time into it.

Some day I needed a website parser for the PHP tool I had been hired to develop. As I had read about Python's urllib just a short time before, I decided to implement that script in Python, not being aware of the actual difference between Python 2 and Python 3. Another hobby, I thought. When the script was nearly complete, I learned that Python 2 is about to be phased out slooooowly and Python 3 lacks a comparable community yet. I assume Python 4 will cause even more trouble, and it's not really worth all that.

I have a couple of other projects in my "To do when there's some more spare time left" list, including a rework of the particular Python script and some web development things. I guess some will be in Common Lisp (learning languages by implementing things in them has always worked out for me), but I also will revive my Perl knowledge. I just don't want to switch to Perl just to see it suffering from the same problem too, Perl 5 being slowly phased out and Perl 6 being not widely accepted. If Perl 5 won't have the same "future" as Python 2, I'm happy to join the old Perl club again; otherwise, I (again) don't really know what to do.

I don't want to rewrite my code every few years just because someone decides that the language I wrote it in is deprecated for no good reason now. Does anyone of you have a deeper, reasonable clue about what will happen with Perl 5 when Perl 6 has gained enough attraction?