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Perl lost the war because it didn't turn-up for the battle. In the 2000s it went into a kind of COVID19 self-isolation phase. First there was Parrot - a half-as

by cutler 6y ago

Perl lost the war because it didn't turn-up for the battle. In the 2000s it went into a kind of COVID19 self-isolation phase. First there was Parrot - a half-assed attempt to create a CLR for dynamic languages. When that failed the MoarVM adventure began. There were about 3 implemetations of Perl6 in development simultaneously (MoarVM, JVM & Rakudo) as Perl5 hemorrhaged mindshare. All-in-all it took 15 years to produce a 1.0 which was so dog-slow for Perl's common use-case it was unusable ... and still is.

jrockway 6y ago
Yeah, Perl 6 was certainly A Thing. I am not sure practicing Perl programmers cared much about it. I went to the talks and thought "neat" but it didn't really seem like "welp, this is taking forever, I'm switching to Python." Maybe if everyone working on Perl 6 decided to work on data science tooling instead, Perl would have "beaten" Python in that area and things would be different, but the world doesn't really work that way, so I don't think Perl 6 really mattered in terms of Perl fading away. A lot of people learned a lot of things about language design, and that will no doubt benefit the entire field for many years to come. (Look at "Go 2" versus "Perl 6", for example.) On some level, everything is like that. Perl was a better awk/grep and was successful in replacing those tools. Then one day, someone decided to use it for CGI, and it got a huge popularity boost. But the people that decided to use it for CGI could have easily used something else, and it would have probably worked fine and Perl never would have been popular. It was just random chance that they picked Perl and made it popular. I feel like everything works that way. Javascript is popular for web UIs because someone decided to add it to a popular web browser. There is always some intrinsic randomness that plays a part in gaining mindshare. A bad tool with a good mindshare can do well, and a great tool with no boost can languish in obscurity. Perl benefited a lot from luck, but rolling the dice doesn't last forever.
- lizmat 6y ago
  Perl 6 is still very much a thing, but it's called Raku now (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). It has a weekly blog post https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog should you care to want to stay up-to-date!
- cutler 6y ago
  If mod_perl had been designed more like mod_php Perl's web frameworks (Catalyst, HTML::Mason, Dancer & Mojolicious) might have had a chance of competing with PHP and Rails. PSGI could have helped Perl compete with Ruby/Rails but PSGI came too late.
lizmat 6y ago
To my knowledge, only 2 implementations were ever in development simultaneously: Niecza and Rakudo. Niecza focused on producing a Perl 6 on the .Net infrastructure. Rakudo is based on NQP (Not Quite Perl) and initially ran on Parrot, then also added the JVM as a backend, and then later added MoarVM as a backend. Niecza sadly stopped being developed as its main developer developer decided it wouldn't be able to come to a full release (around 2012/2013). So to say that "about 3 implemetations of Perl6 in development simultaneously" is incorrect, and then to name MoarVM, JVM and Rakudo as the three is even more incorrect. Perl 6 got renamed to Raku in 2019. Since the first release in December 2015, it has become about two orders of magnitude faster. You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News should you wish to stay up-to-date on developments in the Rakudo world: https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog

by cutler 6y ago

jrockway 6y ago

Yeah, Perl 6 was certainly A Thing. I am not sure practicing Perl programmers cared much about it. I went to the talks and thought "neat" but it didn't really seem like "welp, this is taking forever, I'm switching to Python." Maybe if everyone working on Perl 6 decided to work on data science tooling instead, Perl would have "beaten" Python in that area and things would be different, but the world doesn't really work that way, so I don't think Perl 6 really mattered in terms of Perl fading away. A lot of people learned a lot of things about language design, and that will no doubt benefit the entire field for many years to come. (Look at "Go 2" versus "Perl 6", for example.) On some level, everything is like that. Perl was a better awk/grep and was successful in replacing those tools. Then one day, someone decided to use it for CGI, and it got a huge popularity boost. But the people that decided to use it for CGI could have easily used something else, and it would have probably worked fine and Perl never would have been popular. It was just random chance that they picked Perl and made it popular. I feel like everything works that way. Javascript is popular for web UIs because someone decided to add it to a popular web browser. There is always some intrinsic randomness that plays a part in gaining mindshare. A bad tool with a good mindshare can do well, and a great tool with no boost can languish in obscurity. Perl benefited a lot from luck, but rolling the dice doesn't last forever.

lizmat 6y ago
Perl 6 is still very much a thing, but it's called Raku now (https://raku.org https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). It has a weekly blog post https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog should you care to want to stay up-to-date!
cutler 6y ago
If mod_perl had been designed more like mod_php Perl's web frameworks (Catalyst, HTML::Mason, Dancer & Mojolicious) might have had a chance of competing with PHP and Rails. PSGI could have helped Perl compete with Ruby/Rails but PSGI came too late.

lizmat 6y ago

To my knowledge, only 2 implementations were ever in development simultaneously: Niecza and Rakudo. Niecza focused on producing a Perl 6 on the .Net infrastructure. Rakudo is based on NQP (Not Quite Perl) and initially ran on Parrot, then also added the JVM as a backend, and then later added MoarVM as a backend. Niecza sadly stopped being developed as its main developer developer decided it wouldn't be able to come to a full release (around 2012/2013). So to say that "about 3 implemetations of Perl6 in development simultaneously" is incorrect, and then to name MoarVM, JVM and Rakudo as the three is even more incorrect. Perl 6 got renamed to Raku in 2019. Since the first release in December 2015, it has become about two orders of magnitude faster. You can check out the Rakudo Weekly News should you wish to stay up-to-date on developments in the Rakudo world: https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog