The efforts to create Perl6 have improved Perl5. This is not debatable. The existential threat of Perl6 to Perl5 does not exist except, I concede, as marketing confusion outside the Perl community. The damage to Perl5's reputation is entirely self-inflicted from the crap code of the 90s-early00s dissonantly married to the high-handed refusal to take on the space PHP ate.
Nothing but tools and applications can reverse Perl's backslide or improve its reputation. JavaScript/Ruby/Python are threats to Perl5's evolving future. They are doing better because they are improving their toolchains and putting out more applications.
I personally weigh more and more often starting to bear down on
ECMAScript/ES6 because I would like to have more employment flexibility 10 years from now and this kind of serious JS will have grown considerably while Perl5 will probably not. Plus, some of the JS toolchains are becoming irresistibly attractive.
All the energy put into these silly arguments could be directed at new tools, modules, tutorials, applications, and examples of good Perl. These arguments achieve the opposite of what you want, so I say, and are detrimental to Perl5 while having no effect at all on Perl6.
Update: DERP s/personal/personally/
|