You are so mean and insulting, I almost am crying, my infantile butterfly is comforting me.

So, well, no, I am not crying. That was just a bit of fun. But I am just wondering why anybody would attack people like Liz and me and so many other people who work hard to make Perl 6 a success. I wonder what problems such a person would have: personal, financial, medical, mental, whatever.

As you may know, I am responsible for making the Camelia logo into a stuffed toy, and I always have one on my desk, because I think she is lovely. The Camelia butterfly stuffed toy is quite a nice success, we have sold (or given away) 400 of them already. Quite a lot of people walked over a mile to get money from an ATM to buy one from me.

There are now 8 Perl 6 books published (Perl 6 at a Glance; Think Perl 6; Perl 6 Fundamentals; Perl 6 Deep Dive; Using Perl 6; Learning to Program with Perl 6; Parsing with Perl 6 Regexes and Grammars; Learning Perl 6), and more titles are coming this year and next year. I have agreements with all the publishers of these books, and they give me a nice community price reduction, so I can sell them at workshops, conferences and other Perl and open source events. Looking at the past 18 months, I sold 10x more Perl 6 books than Perl 5 books. I alone, as a small sales person, have sold close to 500 Perl 6 books in 18 months, without doing any marketing, just by being at events.

I've seen several presentations that compared Perl 5 and Perl 6. Initially, the presenters showed how much alike Perl 5 and Perl 6 are. Later on, they showed how Perl 6 can be more concise and at least as powerful, easy to document, and as least as fun to work with as Perl 5.

Liz Mattijsen has worked hard on the CPAN Butterfly Plan and has converted 100+ Perl 5 functions to Perl 6. Quite a lot of those were easy, and they were easy because the languages are so much alike.

Barely related? Nope.
Ten people that care? The Perl6 page on Facebook has 500+ members, and the #perl6 IRC channel always has 300+ chatting and hacking away. Hundreds of people have a book and/or a Camelia. Perl 6 presentations are now a significant part of many Perl-events.
Infantile butterfly? Of course. And it was also meant by Larry Wall to make sure that butch manly testosterone bombs who are just out to insult other people, stay out of our way (personally, I think it is at least a bit infantile to say "I think the butterfly is infantile, therefore I won't work with Perl 6").
Stillborn? With 8 different books, projects like Comma and Cro, Perl 6 taking part at events, Perl 6 seems to be living and working fine.

I fear you are gravely mistaken. I can just hope that at some point you see that Perl 6 can be very useful for you, and that you join in with the Perl 6 gang. It's a friendly group, a fun language, lots have to be done, and you would be welcomed.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.