As one of the primary maintainers of Mason for many years I enjoyed telling non-technical friends that they used my work every time they went to Amazon. But I'd kind of assumed that was no longer the case these days. Apparently I can keep telling them the same thing!
I did a lot of work on it for quite a few years in the early 2000s and maintained it for quite some time after that.
We won't be using perl 6, and suggesting it in the office would get some good laughs out of everyone who's had to work on that codebase.
I'll still write perl when I need a quick one-off script to solve the kind of problem it's good for, like throwing a bunch of regexes at a bunch of text files.
Its a bit like C. The language is so neatly integrated with the OS that its hard to beat it.
Not many languages feel so "Unixy" as Perl.
Sorry if that sounds harsh but in Python, Ruby, even Perl 5 large companies that bet the farm on the language are ten a penny
By that metric, COBOL is awesome.
Zoffix Znet I use it at $work for throw-away one-liners
Awesome
Apples and oranges, given that Swift and Go were started with the deep pockets of Apple and Google behind them.
Look at Ruby for a more fair comparison: It took 10 years to take off, stayed "hot" for ~3 years and has been in slow decline ever since.
Go did not have "Google's deep pockets" behind it. It was something like 4-5 Google employees working on it in their spare time as a side project until it was released to the public, at which point it pretty much became an open source project like any other. The vast, vast majority of Go contributors are not Google employees.
It faced initial hostility everywhere, including at Google itself, and it's been incredibly hard work to get it promoted, marketed, etc.
Hell, I bet the core Go team has spent just as much time writing documentation, tutorials, shooting videos, creating news groups and irc channels and evangelizing as developing the damn thing.
Perl6 needs that - incessant, in-your-face promotion and marketing, conferences, videos, tutorials, the whole shebang. It's not the 90's anymore and I have choice when choosing a language to be productive in, so Perl6 better beef up its efforts to tell me why I should spend even 5 minutes of my time in learning it.
With Go, I was blown away with how easy it was to setup a scalable HTTP server, accept requests, parse JSON, reach out to multiple systems concurrently, the breadth and quality of its std. lib, etc - I had an immediate use-case for such stuff at work. I started investing time in learning Go before it hit 1.0, and it's paid off.
What's Perl6's killer use-case? Performance? compile-time safety? concurrency? scalability? Amazing std. lib? I don't know. It's not immediately clear. So if I'm comfortable scripting with bash/sed/awk or python for those harder use cases - why transition to Perl6? What does it offer in 2018?
It’s been 18 years since Perl 6 was announced...
That's still 14 years, and it sucks for Perl as a brand, but as far as the quality of the final product is concerned, it's completely immaterial if it took 5 or 15 years to arrive...