5 ms·

Perl 6 was what killed it by sucking the life out of the real, working, actual Perl.

by Klwohu 5y ago

arbitrage 5y ago
Perl 6 has been recognized as its own thing, now -- that's all over. The perl we all know and love is quite alright, and holding its own.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Yes its fixed now, but the perl6 debacle was allowed to persist for years. The damage this naming screwup had on both perl5 and raku is massive.
- Vvector 5y ago
  But what he said is true. With all the focus on Perl 6, Perl 5 stagnated for nearly 20, with barely any improvements. Other languages came along and displaced Perl for many jobs. No, Perl won't disappear any time soon. It still excels at a few things. And like Fortran and COBOL, Perl will also have a long life as a legacy language.
  - emilper 5y ago
    ... why do you think Perl 5 stagnated for 20 years ? There were like 10% performance improvements at each new release, a lot of work was done in modules which was by design Perl 5 having a small core and a lot of the features being implemented in modules ... What feature exists in other languages (except for CPU types: int, float, char etc.) and does not exist in Perl 5 ?
  - b2gills 5y ago
    It wasn't even stagnant for a full 10 years, let alone 20. Perl 5.8 was released in 2002 Perl 5.10 was released in 2007 It has had a release every year since 5.12 in 2010. The latest was 5.32 on 2020-Jun-20. (Less than a year ago.) The book Modern Perl was first released in 2010. It's 4th edition was released in 2015. --- Even if you ignored 5.10, there is only 8 years from 5.8 to 5.12 when the yearly releases started happening. I really don't understand how you managed to get 20 years from any of those dates.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Perl 6 was allegedly imminent enough in 2007/2008 that I was considering using it for a new project at that time before determining that it wasn't quite there yet. It wasn't until 2019 that Perl 6 officially became Raku and even later that Perl 7 was announced. A lost decade in the development of a language is pretty bad (although not as bad as the lost 25 years for LaTeX3, which has had the advantage of not having any serious competitors).
- orev 5y ago
  That only happened after a decade of everyone being told Perl 6 was the next version, and people gave up and stopped paying attention. Since no one is paying attention anymore, recent changes to the plans or names have simply not been noticed by most people, so you need a full-on marketing campaign to get most people to become even aware of Raku. Announcing Perl 7 seems like it would be a good way to do that.

Perl 6 was what killed it by sucking the life out of the real, working, actual Perl.

by Klwohu 5y ago

Perl 6 was what killed it by sucking the life out of the real, working, actual Perl.

Perl 6 has been recognized as its own thing, now -- that's all over. The perl we all know and love is quite alright, and holding its own.

blacktriangle 5y ago
Yes its fixed now, but the perl6 debacle was allowed to persist for years. The damage this naming screwup had on both perl5 and raku is massive.
Vvector 5y ago
But what he said is true. With all the focus on Perl 6, Perl 5 stagnated for nearly 20, with barely any improvements. Other languages came along and displaced Perl for many jobs. No, Perl won't disappear any time soon. It still excels at a few things. And like Fortran and COBOL, Perl will also have a long life as a legacy language.
- emilper 5y ago
  ... why do you think Perl 5 stagnated for 20 years ? There were like 10% performance improvements at each new release, a lot of work was done in modules which was by design Perl 5 having a small core and a lot of the features being implemented in modules ... What feature exists in other languages (except for CPU types: int, float, char etc.) and does not exist in Perl 5 ?
- b2gills 5y ago
  It wasn't even stagnant for a full 10 years, let alone 20. Perl 5.8 was released in 2002 Perl 5.10 was released in 2007 It has had a release every year since 5.12 in 2010. The latest was 5.32 on 2020-Jun-20. (Less than a year ago.) The book Modern Perl was first released in 2010. It's 4th edition was released in 2015. --- Even if you ignored 5.10, there is only 8 years from 5.8 to 5.12 when the yearly releases started happening. I really don't understand how you managed to get 20 years from any of those dates.
dhosek 5y ago
Perl 6 was allegedly imminent enough in 2007/2008 that I was considering using it for a new project at that time before determining that it wasn't quite there yet. It wasn't until 2019 that Perl 6 officially became Raku and even later that Perl 7 was announced. A lost decade in the development of a language is pretty bad (although not as bad as the lost 25 years for LaTeX3, which has had the advantage of not having any serious competitors).
orev 5y ago
That only happened after a decade of everyone being told Perl 6 was the next version, and people gave up and stopped paying attention. Since no one is paying attention anymore, recent changes to the plans or names have simply not been noticed by most people, so you need a full-on marketing campaign to get most people to become even aware of Raku. Announcing Perl 7 seems like it would be a good way to do that.