Check out the yearly Perl State of the Onion.

 "

Perl has always been about letting you care about the things you want to care about, while not caring about the things you don't want to care about, or that maybe you're not quite ready to care about yet. That's how Perl achieves both its accessibility and its power. We've just baked more of that "who cares?" philosophy into Perl 6.

A couple of years ago, Tim O'Reilly asked me what great problem Perl 6 was being designed to solve. This question always just sat in my brain sideways because, apart from Perl 0, I have never thought of Perl as the solution to any one particular problem. If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.

As parents, to the extent that we can influence the design of our kids, we design our kids to be creative, not to solve a particular problem. About as close as we get to that is to hope the kid takes over the family business, and we all know how often that sort of coercion works.

No, instead, we design our kids to be ready to solve problems, by helping them learn to be creative, to be socially aware, to know how to use tools, and maybe even how to manufacture the tools for living when they're missing. They should be prepared to do ... whatever."

 


(Perl State of the Onion 10)