Certainly it's worth it to learn perl5. It's not going anywhere. If Perl6 were to be released tomorrow, it would still be years before it had enough penetration to affect most perl programmers. In the mean time, Perl5 is alive and well and will continue to be supported.

Besides, Perl6 doesn't even exist yet. An alpha compiler for Perl6 will maybe exist by the end of 2005.

If you'd like to know what's new and different in Perl6, see http://dev.perl.org/perl6. Read the Apocalypses, Synopses and Exegeses.

As a newbie, is it still worth to learn perl 5

Yes, I think it absolutely is still worth learning Perl 5, for a number of reasons.

• Perl 6 is not out yet, and probably won't be out for a while. I think it will be worth the wait, but there is still some waiting left.
• Even when Perl 6 comes out, Perl 5 won't be going away. Perl 5 is being ported to Parrot (which is the new VM what Perl 6 will use). That means Perl 5 and Perl 6 will [theoretically] live in happy harmony with each other.
• And even if Perl 5 was obsoleted the minute Perl 6 was released, Perl 6 is still Perl. Many things have changed, but knowing Perl 5 will give anyone a huge head start in learning Perl 6.

The power of search supersized. In my humble opinion learning Perl 5 will only help learn Perl 6 and will give you a lot of function while you wait for Perl 6 to be released. Though if you want some more information on Perl 6, here are some of the results of Super Search:

• Is There A Timeline for Release of Perl 6??
• Perl 6 Grammars and Regular Expressions
• Perl 6 ... dead?
• Parrot, the future of dynamic languages ?

Equally silly questions:

• Is it worth it to buy a computer today when those that will be for sale two years from now will have twice the hard drive capacity?
• Should I buy a 2005 Honda when 2006's will be introduced only 365 days from now?
• Should I get a degree in medicine now, even though the cure for AIDS is ten years away?
• Should I fill my gas tank at $2.29/gallon even though the spring should bring lower gas prices?
• Should I get a haircut today even though it just keeps growing?

The answer to any of those questions (including yours) is best given in the form of a question: Do you need it now?

davido++

Should I fill my gas tank at $2.29/gallon even though the spring should bring lower gas prices?

Should it? (I don't have a car, so I don't have any direct experience with gas prices, but I would guess that whole war in the middle-east and the depletion of gas reserves have more to do with the price) By the way $2.29/gallon is awfully low compared to the prices here in europe (4.6 euros per gallon, apparantly)

Should I get a haircut today even though it just keeps growing?

:-) I'm still waiting for my hair to be long enough to be affected by gravity.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

I'm not really sure that gas prices will be better in the spring. ...but then again I'm not entirely sure that Perl 6 will be ready by then either. ;) As for the haircuts, for some of us each new year brings us closer to the day where we no longer need them.




Dave

LOL! ++davido

--
Tommy Butler, a.k.a. TOMMY

"Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl.  I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community."

Absolutely. It's been noted above already, but Perl 5 isn't going anywhere for a long time. I was lucky enough to start with Perl a few revisions into 5 (5.005... I think? I'm not a great Perl historian ;). I still recall a lot of "If you're using < 5, do this..." FAQ answers. And, those were around for years.

In terms of releases for particular operating systems, 5 will be the standard for a while. I'm lumping Win32 into that as well, since Activestate isn't usually bleeding edge with the version they package. They stay within the current stable release. And, most *nix distributions (particularly including the BSDs and commercial *nixen) will have 5 in the stable branch for a long time to come.

Given that 5.6 is still actively supported, even with the wide adoption of 5.8, it just bolsters the case for starting wit 5 even more.

More than two years ago, I asked a somewhat similar question, and not surprisingly got somewhat similar answers.

• If you need perl to get a job, there is more than plenty of time to keep on using perl 5. Jobs are even more conservative than programmers. If you search for the Apache version of most of the web sites, you'll find out that most don't even aproach to Apache version 2.0.-
• Most (freely) available Perl books refer to perl 4. (You need to read at least one Perl book).
• What's wrong about using old functions? They should work now. But as you are starting now, you are learning the new limitations as the normal standards.

It all sounds very cool, but I am having a hard time envisaging doing actual work in such a beast.

You don't have to use the unicode ops you know. Mostly you can program in a subset of perl6 (the one that most closely resembles perl5) and add in the new stuff as you learn it or decide you really need it. The only problem will then be reading other people's code, but I think that the collective consciousness of the perl community will absorb enough perl6 to be able to help with that. :-)

duff

Modern text editors already allow you to read unicode, but my keyboard doesn't allow me to write unicode easily. However, the given .. where construct really excites me! Finally a real switch, and it will be much more powerful than any other language's switch.

Our version of Rational Clearcase still uses Perl4 for scripting and it was only installed 3 years ago, when Perl was reaching version 5.6 (I think). Plus I would like to put 5.8 onto the HP-UX 10.2 boxen I work with, but 5.004 is what the code was originally written with and I don't want to mess with it too much. (Not that I haven't messed it up already :)

How can you feel when you're made of steel? I am made of steel. I am the Robot Tourist.
Robot Tourist, by Ten Benson

Oh, I am not scared of learning it it, I like learning things. It just seems that one of the more common (or at least the more valid) criticisms of Perl is that its encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult; and it seems that the response to that with Perl 6 is: "Oh yeah, you think that was something? Well get a load of this!"

It's like the TIFF spec, I'm pretty sure that a random string of bytes has about a 50% chance of being a valid TIFF file, which makes writing a parser for the format quite a PITA.