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The thing to remember with these questions is that popularity is largely a matter of social dynamics—not the language's intrinsic qualities. I mean, sure, quali
by tikhonj 10y ago
The thing to remember with these questions is that popularity is largely a matter of social dynamics—not the language's intrinsic qualities. I mean, sure, qualities matter to a point, but that point is pretty low: it just has to work well enough. Past that, it's mostly a matter of spreading through social networks, perhaps helped on by marketing.
So when you look at a language and ask why it isn't popular, the answer is probably not that it's bad or that it has terrible features or that it's missing things every other language has.
Instead, the relevant answer is some combination of timing, marketing and luck—and Perl 6 definitely flubbed the first two!
It's been, what, two decades since Perl 5 first came out? In that time, trends have changed, people's preferences have shifted (and ossified) and even the role of a scripting language is different. And Perl 6 is not making any of that up on marketing, niftly logo notwithstanding: the Perl brand has been pretty well tarnished over the past years which makes these the absolutely wrong coattails to try sliding in what is supposed to be a brand new language.
None of this, by the way, shows that Perl 6 is a bad language. That's a different discussion entirely—a discussion in which popularity plays a small role at best.
But it is to say that I'm not all that surprised Perl 6 hasn't gotten anywhere.
- gotofritz 10y agoI agree. Until version 5, Perl has always been considered (rightly or wrongly) a "write only" language awful to maintain and good for awk-like processing or the cgi-bin, and nothing has come out that has changed that perception. They should drop the name Perl altogether and go for Rakudo IMHO
- mcv 10y ago> They should drop the name Perl altogether and go for Rakudo IMHO That would be a great idea. Inside the Perl community, everybody is already invested in Perl 5, and Perl 6 is just too different. Outside the Perl community, nobody would want to be found dead with anything called Perl. If Perl 6 is sufficiently better and sufficiently different, releasing under a new name would make a lot of sense.
- VLM 10y ago"a "write only" language" A cousin of that problem is it doesn't matter how many years ago "Modern Perl" was written, today MySQL still doesn't support transactions. Not a non-sequitur, in that to this day you'll still run into people swearing mysql doesn't support transactions because last time they looked into it in '94 it WAS true, mysql didn't add transaction support until the late 90s IIRC. Likewise its a law that all Perl discussions ignore everything that's happened in Perl development in the last 20 years. If no one has written code like that since '96 it just doesn't matter to the discussion.
- gotofritz 10y agoI actually started drifting away from Perl not that long after it became object oriented, it kind of felt like a bad fit, it lost its "perlness". I assumed that even if it had evolved it would be further along the same path so I wasn't interested. But more importantly, NOBODY I know and rate has come to me and told me "You know what? Perl has moved on, it's actually become a wicked language, you should give it a shot". Whereas that has happened to other languages that I had given up on (ActionScript, JS, PHP) and I had no problem going back to them. As for MySQL, seriously? Are there people who think that in 2016? I find it hard to believe. One thing is a programming language, but for a RDBMS it's just a matter of time before all the feature developer wants get added. With MySQL it's just a matter of "so what's version is it now, have they added them yet?"
- marcosdumay 10y agoFrom my point of view, you seem to have a perfectly correct assessment of it. Yet, as a previous Perl 5 programmer that abandoned it when better languages got powerful enough... How can Perl ever fix it's image in my head, so I'd take a deeper look at it and evaluate this new language? I don't know the answer here. But there are a few things I know. What normally makes me look at languages is a combination of: - Competent people recommending it. (This one is keeping open to learning Perl, but it's still not recommended enough for me to stop and learn it.) - Unique new features. (Stuff that are in no other language. I don't see many for Perl) - Community and ecosystems. (Those will drag me into a language, instead of leading, but they do make me look. Again, Perl has nothing here.) So, Perl 6 has a bit of one of those, and it may be unable to ever get anything more. If for not other reason, because of bad standing image that won't attract many competent people for recommending it. I'm not convinced it will ever get anywhere, whatever is the actual language quality.
- zzzcpan 10y agoThose "competent people" need to see a value in the language, but they don't, that's why they don't recommend it enough.
- marcosdumay 10y agoYep. It's entirely possible that Perl 6 is an amazing language that will make me incredibly productive, yet I'll never think it's convincing enough to learn because I'll look over other people thinking like me, and won't see they trying. It's also perfectly possible that it does not add much value and I shouldn't mind learning it. And there's a lot of effort required to discover what of those is true.