Production Use

So I committed a mortal sin and have been reading Slashdot comments in the recent perl-5.11.0 announcement posted there. And like all conversations regarding Perl in the recent time frame, conversation inevitably drifts toward Perl 5 vs. Perl 6. And what I am finding in a lot of comments, not just on Slashdot, is this unhealthy apologist attitude in supporting Perl 6 by saying it is production ready, etc.

My beef is with this one comment: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391409&cid=29627915

"Really? Can you give examples of problems in Rakudo that would stop it being used in production? Didn't think so."

I guess I should be writing this in a Slashdot comment, but I wanted to address this here and a little more broadly.

The number one rebuttal to the above comment is simply this: IO. I have previously attempted to do a naive port of POE to Rakudo and found it very lacking. There just isn't sufficient IO support in the current implementation of both Rakudo and Parrot to build any truly sound production systems. I can't remember a single system that I've implemented that didn't involve at one point some kind of complex IO such as multiplexing over multiple sockets.

Now I fully support the whole Perl 6 and Parrot thing. I really do. And when they finally get to the point where I can start building the tools that I currently take for granted, then we can start talking about production use.

The entire Parrot and Perl 6 movement has been nothing but awesome in terms of idea generation. The method argument syntax defined in MooseX::Method::Signatures, the concept of Roles, and all sorts of great things that have trickled back into Perl 5. And I even use those ideas in their current implementation for production system use. But the source of those ideas just aren't ready.