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Perl 6 took longer than expected but „Raku“ is alive and well. It even moved into the Tiobe-Index at rank #48 recently: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ http

Perl 6 took longer than expected but „Raku“ is alive and well. It even moved into the Tiobe-Index at rank #48 recently: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ This whole Python/Perl competition was always a bit silly. Both languages had and have their place. I would say Python is so much more popular because it found a niche in ML because of how much more easy it is in Python to interface fast C modules. So you get to write simple Python programs leveraging blazingly fast math libraries. That was always a bit more tricky to do in Perl. But Python as a language is definitely not as flexible as Perl 5. Last time I checked Python didn’t even support multi-line lambdas because its inventor hates those. Python is very much designed in a top-down approach and tries to guide all Python programmers into how there are supposed to solve their problems. Perl 5 was designed with its famous „easy things should be easy, hard problems possible to solve” philosophy. It allows for meta-programming in all the right places which a seasoned Perl developer can reach to when necessary. Perl 5 is a nice middle way between C and Lisp. That being said modern JavaScript turned into a powerful language that fits well into both the frontend and backend side of a web application nowadays and, hence, kind of replaced Perl as glue language for the web. It will also push Python out of web backends at some point I believe.

achileas 3y ago
Having used Python and Perl professionally, I'd have to agree with really all of this. I just want to emphasize Python's niche in ML (since that's what I do with it mostly lately) - it was also helped by a large, early set of libraries specifically for ML that other languages either still don't have or are playing catch-up (Elixir), and its ease of use among academics, a lot of whom went straight from academia to industry.

achileas 3y ago

Having used Python and Perl professionally, I'd have to agree with really all of this. I just want to emphasize Python's niche in ML (since that's what I do with it mostly lately) - it was also helped by a large, early set of libraries specifically for ML that other languages either still don't have or are playing catch-up (Elixir), and its ease of use among academics, a lot of whom went straight from academia to industry.