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Perl's popularity waned because of the whole Perl 6 fiasco, which stole lots of energy from Perl 5, offered no migration path from Perl 5, and eventually evolve

Perl's popularity waned because of the whole Perl 6 fiasco, which stole lots of energy from Perl 5, offered no migration path from Perl 5, and eventually evolved into a completely different language. As a result, Perl 5 development stalled, and developers went elsewhere. I personally stopped writing new Perl code around 2005-2006 after learning Python 2 in 2003-2004 (when I was doing a lot of Zope/Plone hacking). I think Python 3 almost killed Python, too, and for the same reasons. The developers behind 2to3 saved the community, in my opinion, as did the folks who made the painful decision to publish a Python 2 end-of-life date sufficiently far enough into the future that people still using the old runtime had both a sense of urgency and plenty of time to complete their migrations. I finally made the leap to Python 3 around 2016. I'd like to claim that I jumped instead of being pushed, but the reality is that by then, people were developing new stuff I wanted badly on Python 3 exclusively.

eesmith 4y ago
I think "six" proved more useful than 2to3. This made it easier to support both Python 2 and Python 3 in the same code base, which (IMO) resulted in a smoother migration path.
- xenophonf 4y ago
  You're absolutely right, and again, I think that reinforces how important a good migration path was to Python 3. Without that path, I think there was a real risk of Python dying off same as Perl 5. It's sad because there was a lot I liked about Perl. I wish that community had better leadership because from my quick glance at the Wikipedia page, it looks like the Perl 7 project is making the same mistakes as Perl 6/Raku did. It's really too bad.
at_a_remove 4y ago
Perl's popularity was already in a nosedive by that point. I was programming in Perl much prior, was on numerous mailing lists, etc. The dropoff was startling. Frankly, I believe the terrible state of affairs on CPAN was part of the problem, but it was initiated by the "there's more than one way to do it" mentality. If I wanted to do something where it would be a good idea to have a library for that task, I would have to search many candidates, each of which did sixty to eighty percent of whatever, then see which were long-abandoned, did what they actually managed to write match what I needed, etc.

eesmith 4y ago

I think "six" proved more useful than 2to3. This made it easier to support both Python 2 and Python 3 in the same code base, which (IMO) resulted in a smoother migration path.

xenophonf 4y ago
You're absolutely right, and again, I think that reinforces how important a good migration path was to Python 3. Without that path, I think there was a real risk of Python dying off same as Perl 5. It's sad because there was a lot I liked about Perl. I wish that community had better leadership because from my quick glance at the Wikipedia page, it looks like the Perl 7 project is making the same mistakes as Perl 6/Raku did. It's really too bad.

at_a_remove 4y ago

Perl's popularity was already in a nosedive by that point. I was programming in Perl much prior, was on numerous mailing lists, etc. The dropoff was startling. Frankly, I believe the terrible state of affairs on CPAN was part of the problem, but it was initiated by the "there's more than one way to do it" mentality. If I wanted to do something where it would be a good idea to have a library for that task, I would have to search many candidates, each of which did sixty to eighty percent of whatever, then see which were long-abandoned, did what they actually managed to write match what I needed, etc.