Random Musings from Randal

First, Perl6 is not “the next Perl5”. Perl5 will be alive and well for another decade at least, independently maintained and released. That’s happening quite efficiently and effectively already. (Translated: “I will quite possibly be able to continue making money off Perl5 for years to come”.)

So, what is Perl6 then? It’s a different language. Businesses aren’t going to migrate from Perl5 to Perl6, but they will consider Perl6 for a new project, just as if they’d consider Ruby or Python or Grails or Scala or any other language.

What’s missing is the equivalent for what Rails did for Ruby: a compelling web framework.

If we had a compelling web framework for Perl6, people would start taking notice. And like Rails, I think we can start by building something to “eat our own dogfood”. Perhaps a Perl6 equivalent of Perlmonks or Mediawiki. Whatever it is, it should be an application that will also be able to be used by other communities, so that people will want to start using not only the application, but also the framework.

Read the rest of my blog post on my Perl blog.