Re:What Killed Perl?
by actionfromafar on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @06:26PM
(#45986739)
And killing Perl 5 in the process. If Perl would have kept going in its own pace and Perl 6 would have been named Rapture or Raku from day one, Perl would have been fine.
Nowadays when everyone and their dog (vcpkg) have a package system, it’s easy to overlook how magical CPAN was. A solution to the weirdest problem, just a package away.
CPAN and similar things like CTAN were simply phenomenal in a way that really is hard to explain today; since everything has it now.
It was a magical time.
If they hadn't done Perl 6 the way they did, it'd still be around. Perl 5 was fine but the impending doom gradually let it be overcome.
Re:What Killed Perl?
by atherton94027 on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @06:29PM
(#45986758)
It's interesting because you can still find interviews of Larry online how Perl is the first postmodern programming language but for perl6 they came up with a very top-down, modernist project
I had a similar experience. It was so disappointing to watch them bike shed Perl 6 endlessly while Python was gradually taking over.
Even as a die-hard mod_perl fan, I never even tried Perl 6. The language had gone from the most concise and efficient way to process text streams to an incredibly complex OOP language that for some reason had an experimental Haskell implementation, its own custom VM and multiple compilers.
The real issue is not just that Perl6 wasn’t backwards compatible, it was that Perl6 basically did not exist for real for many, many years. People got tired of waiting, and the lack of backwards compatibility did not help.
Also Perl6 was just more weird on top of weird from a mainstream perspective. Making it even harder to justify.