Last year I mentioned a letter-to-the-editor in Communications of the ACM which discussed the short-comings of Python as an introduction to programming for computer science students. As a response to that letter, I suggested that the dissatisfied professor consider Perl 6 as it would meet his requirements.
My casual look at the programming scene over the last decade seems to show that Python is regularly chosen as the language for open source projects and as a teaching language. The Perl community on <perlmonks.org> seems adamant that there are few, if any, business reasons for Perl 5 shops to use Perl 6, so the academic community may be the best place to aim Perl 6 marketing for the growth of a Perl 6 community among young people. I have seen lots of blogs and on-line articles comparing the two languages, but I have not yet found one truly suitable for college and high school academic marketing and curriculum development. The only article on Perl 6 I have found in the ACM archives was a 2007 article by Audrey Tang. Its citation and access page is found here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1190216.1190218 Note the ACM reports that the article has been cited two times in other ACM articles, and has been downloaded a total of 524 times. I also searched the IEEE archives for Perl 6 and found nothing. Suggestion ======== I suggest that a good move would be to produce a good, and current, scholarly article, aiming to be published in a suitable professional journal, with a detailed, objective comparison between Python and Perl 6. I'm sure there are properly-qualified people in the Perl 6 community that could do a very credible job, and it should be worth support from the Perl Foundation. Audrey Tang's article (based on information on the citation page only) doesn't seem to fit the specific comparison I think is needed, but the article may be useful background for any new author. Of course there may already be such an article in academia, but apparently not in the computer science education realm. Best regards, -Tom
