Perl Foundation Requests (more) Funding

Over at use.perl there is a short call for funding from TPF to help fund the development of Perl6 and Parrot. I’ve long been a Perl 5 fan, it’s flexible, powerful, CPAN rocks and there are a number of smart, helpful people involved. As much as I like the community the killer feature is letting me get things done quickly and easily.

When it comes to Perl6 I’ve just not found anything that really interests me. I’ve read some of the lists, the RFCs and Larry and Damian’s pieces on perl.com and while there are some neat ideas, a number of the features just won’t have a massive impact on the kind of development (mostly sysadmin automation stuff and little side projects like those on this site) that I’m involved in. Add Ruby, a language that I like a lot, to that and I’m no longer concerned if it ever actually gets released.

Ahh yes, I knew there was a reason I started this post. Some of the comments, which you can see in an expanded comments view are from people that are even more cynical than me about Perl6. And that’s always nice to see :) My (semi-rhetorical) question; is Perl6 actually an answer to the right question? Why is the Perl market so much smaller than C#, .NET or Java? And will a new release with shiny features make the slightest bit of difference?