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There are real companies doing real work in newer languages like Swift and Go too Apples and oranges, given that Swift and Go were started with the deep pocket

by cygx 9y ago

There are real companies doing real work in newer languages like Swift and Go too Apples and oranges, given that Swift and Go were started with the deep pockets of Apple and Google behind them. Look at Ruby for a more fair comparison: It took 10 years to take off, stayed "hot" for ~3 years and has been in slow decline ever since.

gaius 9y ago
It took 10 years to take off It’s been 18 years since Perl 6 was announced...
- cygx 9y ago
  18 years since it was announced that language design would start. While development of the Parrot VM (ultimately abandoned) started in 2001, the apocalypses weren't all written until 2004 (never mind the Synopses), and Rakudo arguably was born that year as well, when pmichaud started working on PGE. That's still 14 years, and it sucks for Perl as a brand, but as far as the quality of the final product is concerned, it's completely immaterial if it took 5 or 15 years to arrive...
PopsiclePete 9y ago
>Apples and oranges, given that Swift and Go were started with the deep pockets of Apple and Google behind them. Go did not have "Google's deep pockets" behind it. It was something like 4-5 Google employees working on it in their spare time as a side project until it was released to the public, at which point it pretty much became an open source project like any other. The vast, vast majority of Go contributors are not Google employees. It faced initial hostility everywhere, including at Google itself, and it's been incredibly hard work to get it promoted, marketed, etc. Hell, I bet the core Go team has spent just as much time writing documentation, tutorials, shooting videos, creating news groups and irc channels and evangelizing as developing the damn thing. Perl6 needs that - incessant, in-your-face promotion and marketing, conferences, videos, tutorials, the whole shebang. It's not the 90's anymore and I have choice when choosing a language to be productive in, so Perl6 better beef up its efforts to tell me why I should spend even 5 minutes of my time in learning it. With Go, I was blown away with how easy it was to setup a scalable HTTP server, accept requests, parse JSON, reach out to multiple systems concurrently, the breadth and quality of its std. lib, etc - I had an immediate use-case for such stuff at work. I started investing time in learning Go before it hit 1.0, and it's paid off. What's Perl6's killer use-case? Performance? compile-time safety? concurrency? scalability? Amazing std. lib? I don't know. It's not immediately clear. So if I'm comfortable scripting with bash/sed/awk or python for those harder use cases - why transition to Perl6? What does it offer in 2018?

by cygx 9y ago

gaius 9y ago

It took 10 years to take off It’s been 18 years since Perl 6 was announced...

cygx 9y ago
18 years since it was announced that language design would start. While development of the Parrot VM (ultimately abandoned) started in 2001, the apocalypses weren't all written until 2004 (never mind the Synopses), and Rakudo arguably was born that year as well, when pmichaud started working on PGE. That's still 14 years, and it sucks for Perl as a brand, but as far as the quality of the final product is concerned, it's completely immaterial if it took 5 or 15 years to arrive...

PopsiclePete 9y ago

>Apples and oranges, given that Swift and Go were started with the deep pockets of Apple and Google behind them. Go did not have "Google's deep pockets" behind it. It was something like 4-5 Google employees working on it in their spare time as a side project until it was released to the public, at which point it pretty much became an open source project like any other. The vast, vast majority of Go contributors are not Google employees. It faced initial hostility everywhere, including at Google itself, and it's been incredibly hard work to get it promoted, marketed, etc. Hell, I bet the core Go team has spent just as much time writing documentation, tutorials, shooting videos, creating news groups and irc channels and evangelizing as developing the damn thing. Perl6 needs that - incessant, in-your-face promotion and marketing, conferences, videos, tutorials, the whole shebang. It's not the 90's anymore and I have choice when choosing a language to be productive in, so Perl6 better beef up its efforts to tell me why I should spend even 5 minutes of my time in learning it. With Go, I was blown away with how easy it was to setup a scalable HTTP server, accept requests, parse JSON, reach out to multiple systems concurrently, the breadth and quality of its std. lib, etc - I had an immediate use-case for such stuff at work. I started investing time in learning Go before it hit 1.0, and it's paid off. What's Perl6's killer use-case? Performance? compile-time safety? concurrency? scalability? Amazing std. lib? I don't know. It's not immediately clear. So if I'm comfortable scripting with bash/sed/awk or python for those harder use cases - why transition to Perl6? What does it offer in 2018?