Back in the 2000’s Perl was my bread and butter. The thing about perl6 was it over promised and... well... never delivered. It was to be a from scratch rewrite

Back in the 2000’s Perl was my bread and butter. The thing about perl6 was it over promised and... well... never delivered. It was to be a from scratch rewrite. It was gonna have all these space-age feature like a VM to host other languages like what .net or Java does. It was gonna try to fix years of baggage. It was gonna be super hot. But it never shipped in time. Meanwhile python was an excellent alternative. Ruby on Rails was just coming around. C# was becoming a real contender (c# remains one of my favorite languages...). All those languages were getting tons of community support. Perl’s community was starting to slow. It’s top devs were busy with v6. V5 was not getting any cool new features. And it was made quite clear that v6 had many breaking changes from v5. I dunno. I file perl6 in the same bucket I file Netscape and Winamp. Proof that doing ground up “from scratch” rewrites are great ways to kill forward momentum on your product. Rewrites take much longer than any estimate. To pull it off you need to have unlimited budget and the ability to support and improve the current version while also building a brand new version whose scope constantly creeps to maintain parity with your current version. The second you stop maintaining and improving what you have in the market today, your competitors will eat your lunch. It is what killed Netscape to a large extent. It killed Winamp to a large extent. And it put a couple nails in perl’s coffin too.