What stops me from using Perl 6, today?

Since I got hooked on the Perl community, and got a taste of Perl 6, I've been wondering about:

1. what, exactly, is it that I could use Perl 6 for, right now?
2. why am I not actively using Perl 6 now?

Those are easy questions, but answering is hard, so this may be a long post.

Sure, the points listed below are not exactly Perl 6 specific; I could probably have picked some other programming language, but I somehow feel more comfortable in the way that Perl 6 still is Perl.

What I could use Perl 6 for right now

I think it's fair to say that using Perl 6 today mostly means using Rakudo, and that I wouldn't use it in what we popularly call a "production setting". But many of us programmers, sysadmins, geeks and nerds have perfectly suitable hobby projects, where we won't have clients wringing our necks if there is three minutes of downtime in a month, or if we don't deliver the Speedy Gonzalez of services; we have projects that are neither computing performance constrained or stability constrained.

So that's where I could have started using Perl 6 half a year ago, and of course still can.

I know I can use Perl 6 for e.g. a fairly complex web site using Web.pm and Squerl for a SQLite backend. It will probably work just fine, for a lot of projects.

I know I can use it for lots of one-liner scripts.

I know that in some regards, Perl 6 will outperform classic Perl 5 in terms of programmer time spent. An example is the given-when control structure, which (to me) is semantically superior to if-elsif-elsif-elsif. Programmer time is important to me, I hate coding too much for menial tasks. And I'm sorry to say that Perl 5.10 doesn't do it yet for me, as I cannot rely on its presence, even for hobby projects.

And I know I can use Perl 6 to refresh some of the knowledge about programming language specifics (terminology, technique, methodology, etc.) that I've allowed to rust since I left university in 2001.

Concrete projects, in no particular order

• web page for registration of pool billiards tournament results; it's not performance critical, and the users could check and verify the dataset themselves after input


• conversion of historical results data in CSV format to a database; one-time job, needs manual verification no matter what programming language I use to do it


• contributing to the Temporal.pm specification and implementation in Perl 6


• personal web gallery generation; I positively loathe most of the online galleries, because they sooner rather than later are discovered to have HUGE, GAPING security vulnerabilities


• blogging tool; I'm not very comfortable with blog software running on servers, either, and whatever blogging I do, it's not actual work

That's quite a lot, isn't it? It ought to have been enough to get me going in a jiffy!

Why I'm not actively using Perl 6 now

This may be a surprise to some: it's not because of a lack of matureness in the tools, a lack of confidence in the language or tools, stability issues, etc. As I tangentially mentioned above, I believe there is no technical hindrance for me to start coding on a hobby project.

I have plenty of hobby projects to choose from. They are also quite manageable in terms of eventual lines of code.

However, there is something holding me back, and that's a certain degree of perfectionism mixed with procrastination fever.

mst mentioned during the NPW hackathon this spring that perfectionism was a barrier against getting started. If you're too obsessed with getting things right at first, at wanting to avoid failure, procrastinating is too easy. Getting slightly intoxicated (yup, drinking alcohol, which of course is only a recourse for adults) is a way of reducing your own perfection anxiety. This is almost exactly what Randall Munroe's xkcd calls the Ballmer Peak:



But I don't sleep too well after drinking alcohol, and I also tend to do hobby projects in my "running breaks" during work hours, in which case alcohol intake may be a very bad idea.

In addition, my time at work is a series of interruptions, which really isn't conductive to sitting down and learning something new and complex.

When I get home from work, I'm usually so fed up with computers that I don't want to have anything to do with them.

So my spare time, whatever is left of it, usually isn't spent on programming. Note that I don't even do these projects in a programming language I already know well; they are on hold regardless of that.

All in all, there's nothing much wrong with Perl 6.

Blaming the immaturity of Rakudo would just be a silly excuse. There's something wrong with my capacity for finding the time to get down and dirty with it, that's what; I'm apparently not currently capable of saying honestly:

This is my Perl 6 hour. This hour, I'm going to do Perl 6 stuff, and this time is sacred.