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I think they lost it with Perl 6. Perl 6 was a bit late, but it could have been a better rejuvenation for Perl than Python 3 was for Python. Instead it took wa
by Tepix 6y ago
I think they lost it with Perl 6. Perl 6 was a bit late, but it could have been a better rejuvenation for Perl than Python 3 was for Python.
Instead it took way too long, had confusing naming with the various implementations and frankly some features that are not very useful for anyone but linguists.
I mean, why would you want to redefine your language from within the language? To confuse your co-workers? To win the obfuscated perl contest?
Perl 6 also has some real innovation like its new regular expressions. I'm afraid they will never get widely adopted.
FWIW i never had a problem with nested data structures in perl. I found the perl documentation ("perldoc perldata") to be fantastic.
- lizmat 6y agoPlease note that Perl 6 is no longer a thing: it has been renamed to the Raku Programming Language (https://raku.org https://raku.org). If you want to stay up-to-date, you can check out the Rakudo Weekly News at https://rakudoweekly.blog https://rakudoweekly.blog
- arglebargle69 6y agoThis is precisely the problem
- tsjq 6y agoHahaa. So true
- kqr 6y agoThis was the problem. It's now been fixed. Or do you think Perl 6 was the more meaningful name?
- znpy 6y agoEh, it sorta still is? Not really, but if you spent ten years announcing an upcoming perl6, then you rename it to Raku... There will be confusion, at least.
- emodendroket 6y agoNot just confusion. If you hype it up as the future and then drop it how excited are people really going to get for the old stuff?
- lizmat 6y agoPerl 6 was released in December 2015. A little under 4 years later, it was renamed to Raku. Plenty of time to not be confused.
- DonHopkins 6y agoThey should have done what the YAML designers did when they suddenly realized to their great surprise that the language they themselves designed and named was NOT actually a markup language: Keep the exact same name and a perfectly straight face, then recursively retronymonically redefine it to mean something completely different: the opposite of what it initially meant! "Yet Another Markup Language" => "YAML Ain't Markup Language" So "PERL 5" is to "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language 6", as "PERL 6" is a "PERL E___ R___ L___ 6". (Pattern matching and filling in the blanks is left as an exercise for GTP-3.)
- Doctor_Fegg 6y agoProgrammers Embraced Rasmus Lerdorf?
- DonHopkins 6y agoOr PERL Embarrassed Rasmus Lerdorf!
- dbt00 6y agoThe problem isn't that all this happened, or maybe that is the problem, the problem is that the future of Perl was very confusing for a very long time. Python 3 was announced in 2006, committed to as the future in 2008, and the last significant release of Python 2 was in 2010. There was a hard deprecation deadline of the Python 2 in 2015, which was postponed in 2014 to 2020. It wasn't fantastic and there was some pain and some poor decisions but everybody knew where the language was going and how to stay in front of it. Perl 6 was announced in 2000 and there were only 2 releases of Perl 5 for 7 years. Then in the 2007-2010 timeframe regular releases of Perl 5 resumed. Eventually everyone kind of realized that Perl6 was DOA as the next major release of Perl, but that process happened gradually over the course of nearly 20 years, by which time most of the rest of the world had written off Perl as a significant entity.
- coldpie 6y agoI'm not in the Perl world. I have heard of Perl 6 and know what it is. I've never heard of Raku before this thread. "perl6" and "perl 6" together have 58 matches on this page right now (before my comment). Raku has 28.
- smitty1e 6y agoI was at the point of deciding whether to focus on Perl or Python when there was the 01Apr "Parrot" gag on Slashdot. This was a couple of decades back. Then Larry Wall announced Perl6 and focusing on Python while awaiting P6 was an easy call.
- lostapathy 6y agoPerl 6 wasn't "a bit late" - the path forward meandered for years, so the point even diehard perl fans (me, at the time) questioned whether it could/would ever happen. And as pointed out down thread, the branding completely changed at least once or twice along the way, to the point perl fans of 20 years ago don't even know "perl 6" became something else today.
- Tepix 6y agoSorry, you're right. What I meant to say was "Perl 6 started a bit late". For a while it looked very promising but then it went downhill.