4 ms·

I wonder how much of Perl's decline can be attributed to the Duke-Nukem-Forever-tier delay in releasing perl6. It seemed like so much of the web ran on it in t

I wonder how much of Perl's decline can be attributed to the Duke-Nukem-Forever-tier delay in releasing perl6. It seemed like so much of the web ran on it in the late 90s and early 2000s that it would have at least as much traction as PHP does today.

cygx 8y ago
Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. One can speculate what might have happened if focus had been put on evolving Perl5, or getting Rakudo production-ready as-is instead of going through yet another round of 'tinkering' (eg making the compiler backend-independent, the New Object Model refactor, creation of MoarVM, the Great List Refactor, ...) - however my crystal ball seems to be broken and just continues to display 42 no matter the question...
- peteretep 8y ago
  > The design process for Perl 6 began in 2000 I don’t remember Perl losing mindshare around that time; quite the opposite.
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Perl6 wasn't _released_ until 2016, though.
    - bmn__ 8y ago
      You mean, 1.0 of the spec was released then. Don't pretend it wasn't perfectly possible to write and run useful Perl6 programs for a good ten years prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming) https://github.com/viklund/november/ https://github.com/viklund/november/
      - earenndil 8y ago
        For some definition of 'perl6'. I have a perl6 book from o'reilly from 2006, and I flipped through it recently. It bears almost no resemblance to modern perl6. There were a couple of things that were still the same (and not just vestiges from perl5 like sigils and function calls looking like function calls), but by and large it was something completely different.
    - b2gills 8y ago
      You mean 2015. Specifically December 25th 2015.
  - cygx 8y ago
    Just one anecdote: https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=1225020 https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=1225020
- ergothus 8y ago
  > Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. True, but when your reaction takes 10 years, you lost a lot of ground. When perl6 was started perl was declining but still in serious use.
  - b2gills 8y ago
    And today Perl is declining but still in serious use. It's percentage has dropped by a significant amount, but I would bet the amount of new code has not dropped nearly as much. Also I'm fairly certain that Go is close to a 10 year reaction to Python. (If not it's implementation.) The only difference is that it wasn't done in public. It's so much easier to ignore the years of development when you can hide it.
collyw 8y ago
In my opinion a lot. I got my first job in 2003 programming Perl 5 and the way it was talked about, it sounded like Perl 6 was just a year or two away.

cygx 8y ago

Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. One can speculate what might have happened if focus had been put on evolving Perl5, or getting Rakudo production-ready as-is instead of going through yet another round of 'tinkering' (eg making the compiler backend-independent, the New Object Model refactor, creation of MoarVM, the Great List Refactor, ...) - however my crystal ball seems to be broken and just continues to display 42 no matter the question...

peteretep 8y ago
> The design process for Perl 6 began in 2000 I don’t remember Perl losing mindshare around that time; quite the opposite.
- earenndil 8y ago
  Perl6 wasn't _released_ until 2016, though.
  - bmn__ 8y ago
    You mean, 1.0 of the spec was released then. Don't pretend it wasn't perfectly possible to write and run useful Perl6 programs for a good ten years prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming) https://github.com/viklund/november/ https://github.com/viklund/november/
    - earenndil 8y ago
      For some definition of 'perl6'. I have a perl6 book from o'reilly from 2006, and I flipped through it recently. It bears almost no resemblance to modern perl6. There were a couple of things that were still the same (and not just vestiges from perl5 like sigils and function calls looking like function calls), but by and large it was something completely different.
  - b2gills 8y ago
    You mean 2015. Specifically December 25th 2015.
- cygx 8y ago
  Just one anecdote: https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=1225020 https://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=1225020
ergothus 8y ago
> Perl6 was a reaction to Perl's loss of mindshare, not its cause. True, but when your reaction takes 10 years, you lost a lot of ground. When perl6 was started perl was declining but still in serious use.
- b2gills 8y ago
  And today Perl is declining but still in serious use. It's percentage has dropped by a significant amount, but I would bet the amount of new code has not dropped nearly as much. Also I'm fairly certain that Go is close to a 10 year reaction to Python. (If not it's implementation.) The only difference is that it wasn't done in public. It's so much easier to ignore the years of development when you can hide it.

collyw 8y ago

In my opinion a lot. I got my first job in 2003 programming Perl 5 and the way it was talked about, it sounded like Perl 6 was just a year or two away.