Increase supply of labor, decrease wages. Econ 101, folks. The Wall Street types benefit from immigration. There might be "more jobs" but there will be lower pay checks. Working Americans are the targets in this upper class scam. Polls show that most Americans are for moderating immigration. Strangely, rich Democrats are the ones most for open borders and "free" trade. The party of labor? No way.
Decreased wages for those who have jobs, plus more people having jobs, might be an excellent tradeoff even if it wouldn't appeal to a 100% selfish person who has a job and doesn't fear losing it.
And you need to be awfully careful about what "polls show that most Americans are for". For example, polls show that most Americans would like to see US foreign aid reduced from about 25% of GDP to about 10% of the federal budget. The trouble is that the actual level of US foreign aid is about 1% of the federal budget. So, do "polls show" that most Americans would like foreign aid cut by 2.5x, or that most Americans would like foreign aid increased by 10x? -- In the absence of more information about what "most Americans" actually think the level of immigration is, and what they think its impact is, polls purporting to show that most Americans would like more or less immigration are pretty uninformative about what would actually benefit most Americans, or what they would choose if they had better information.
It would be better to keep party politics out of this. (Though from what you've written I wonder whether party politics are your only reason for being interested in the matter at all.)
No Perl 6 implementation is mature enough to use for practical purposes.
LLVM probably won't help Perl 5, because Perl 5 lacks sufficient type information, and because LLVM's design really seems to want static languages. See also the JVM and the CLR.
Its odd syntax ... is terrible for long term maintainability.
I would never attempt to maintain code written in a language I don't know.
I don't know what "compilable Perl" has to do with the CPAN. "Compilation" suggests some sort of execution and distribution strategy, while the CPAN is an archive of resuable code and the surrounding ecosystem of dependency management, documentation, bug tracking, history, annotation, and comprehensive testing around it.
I'm suggesting that if you measure the amount of code submitted to the CPAN, the number of authors, the frequency of updates, and the freshness of versions, you'll see that Perl 5 is far from stagnant.
You mean CPAN is far from stagnant. CPAN is nice, yes, but I don't think CPAN alone is enough to invite newcomers to Perl.
Perl 5 itself is stagnant. New features are not developed in Perl 5 but Perl 6. Perl 6 ist still not mature after several years of development. I tried it on Parrot yesterday, it ran way slower than Perl 5. Who ever would use it when even the Perl advocates don't recommend it? Perl 6 looked so promising. I am disappointed.
I'm sorry to say, but you're merely showing that you're not aware of core development of Perl. Not a mistake of your's, mind, marketing of perl core dev is terrible and i need to start fixing that, but there's a lot going on:
A link "Current Developments" in perl.org would be helpful. Thanks for the links but I'm not interested in minor changes of Perl 5 (Unicode etc.). I was very interested in the new features of Perl 6.
No matter, I lost my patience and left Perl years before and returned into the Lisp and Scheme world where I was before. Sometimes I still use Perl 5 but merely for small scripts.
Perl 6 got stuck in Parrot while Lisp enjoys a revival in Clojure, Qi/Shen and Racket Scheme which are all usable and under heavy development.
The new Lisp versions support multiprocessors and compile to JVM, Javascript (V8), Lisp, Scheme or C. Lisp and Scheme macros are still superior. In Qi/Shen I can even write attribute grammars in BNF style. I can compile my source to standalone native EXE files which are really fast. For that reason I prefer Scheme and Lisp over Python and Ruby. I don't need Perl 6 anyymore!
