Perl 5 is still the best language to use to process text data, but the world today needs much more resources:
- A good IDE, like Eclipse for Java.
- Good multi-threading.
- Standard and rich GUI.
Sadly, I must agree with those who think that the assumptions behind this statement is faulty. In particular, and at the risk of sounding ancient, I question the claim that the world "needs" these things at all:
- An IDE may be useful to those who like it. I find that multiple xterm's and vim with syntax coloring is more than sufficient to develop some fairly elaborate applications. When you find the need to run in a debugger, IDE's become more beneficial; but I only go there rarely myself.
- Good multithreading is probably essential on an operating system that has a heavy cost to fork/exec a new process (read: Windows or VMS), but I find that a simple pipe open or backticks gives pretty good results, for most asynchronous activities.
- As with the prior bullet, "standard and rich GUI" might be interpreted as a good thing when working in an environment where a process needs a window to be useful, but I favor text*. And there's always Tk or HTML, if you need to generate fancy output.
If you want them, that's marvelous, and I hope you get them. From what I can tell, these goals really aren't that far off, and don't even require Perl6 for practical benefit. I just hope they get implemented in a modest amount of system resources, so that those of us who don't want them won't need another memory upgrade just to get by.
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of an entirely rational individual, as he suffered many years programming under the tyranny of Windows before being liberated into his current work under Linux. YMMV.
* Update: Preference for text input methods subject to change, provided that I grow a third arm (ala Zaphod Beeblebrox) to drive the mouse.
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