Re:Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
by pjc50 on Thursday March 26, 2020 @08:56AM
(#22693041)
Perl is possibly the clearest example of the "Osborne effect": announcing Perl6 took focus off Perl5, but it took far too long to arrive. So by the time it did many of the community had drifted away and the core use cases were becoming less relevant. Python almost did this to itself with the 2to3 transition.
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Re:Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
by cesarb on Thursday March 26, 2020 @10:20AM
(#22693811)
An important difference is that Python 3.0 arrived soon, while it took ages for a complete Perl 6 release to be available. That is, if you didn't want to learn or use Python 2.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, you already had a working alternative; but if you didn't want to learn or use Perl 5.x because it was soon going to be obsolete, for a significant amount of time Perl 6 wasn't an option.
Re:Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
by devurand on Thursday March 26, 2020 @12:03PM
(#22694937)
> it took ages for a complete Perl 6 release to be available.
And unfortunately, the brilliant minds that worked on Perl 6 spent so much time rewriting the compiler tool chain and basically treating just that part as a research project, that it was incredibly difficult to actually contribute and push the project forward. Couple that with a spec that never seemed finished and a community that tore itself apart because of assholes, and it was a perfect storm to remove Perl from prominence.