Even in context it was false. You asked me to show an inaccuracy. I did. And took a downvote beating for it and my belligerence from being tired of this genre and noname monk pile-ups.

Criticizing Perl6 is your prerogative. But you see how transparent things are and how attitudes are reflected even when unintended. The idea that the effort that went into Perl6 would have magically been redirected into Perl5 is faulty thinking; a weird kind of zero sum. Again, I was right for what I read.

I am not a fan of “this sux” style posts. They are not calls to arms. They help no one. They do nothing but demoralize. In the parlance of the kids: they are a kind of virtue signaling. If one in fact thinks things should be better, one should be out making them better instead of lamenting.

> The idea that the effort that went into Perl6 would have magically been redirected into Perl5 is faulty thinking

Of course, but do you deny the Osborne effect?

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

In this case I believe I do deny the Osborne effect; I think something of the opposite happened. I’m a believer in it on general terms. This story doesn’t fit at all as I see it.

Perl died in the 90s.

Back the to the big bag of anecdotes. In ’98 I was at Amazon.com. Tons of the infrastructure tools, almost all of the customer service and order manipulation tools, all the Intranet, the templating system for the actual site catalog: Perl. And the company leadership and dev managers were dying to flush it all. The company was hiring new devs hand over fist. They were trained on C and Java and nothing else. To them Perl was a joke scripting language for plebs and junior sysadmin janitor types and people who didn’t need to write enterprise level code. By ’99 the decision to go ahead and pull the toilet lever was in full swing. All those customer/order tools were being replaced with Java. The important Intranet tools I wasn’t personally authoring were being written in Ruby. I’ve told this story before.

This was before Jon Orwant did his Captain Quint impression with coffee mugs standing in for chalkboard. Regardless of the wasted time and lack of execution that followed, Jon Orwant was right. Larry Wall was right. The echo chamber and the inordinate fondness many JAPHs feel for the language had, and continues, mysteriously, to blind people. PHP couldn’t be laughed off just because it’s awful. It was awful but it was becoming deployable in ways Perl never has been. Perl was on a one-way track to the grave. Period. I was in the center of the Internet tech hub and no one there wanted Perl who didn’t already know it. And a metric crapton of those who did know it found Ruby more seductive and shiny and they left for it.

The only reason Perl is forever sinking is lack of tools and applications. There is nothing inherently better in the other dynamic languages. In fact, Perl has been objectively better than all of them in some regards like regex, Unicode, command line handiness, and defect density. The lack of tools and apps is not Perl’s fault. It’s not the porters fault. It’s not Perl6’s fault. It’s not Python. It’s the Perl community’s fault. And from this point forward, ECMAScript—unless things like the terribly interesting miracle haukex has pulled off in webperl take off—because ES is turning into an amazing back end language and its “CPAN” subjectively looks to have soundly thrashed Perl’s a couple of years ago already and is still booming.

Perl came back from the dead a bit c2005 because of Catalyst and DBIx::Class and Moose and the flood into the Tiny:: space; and, I argue, because of Perl6. Perl was dead to the world. Perl6’s hype brought attention to the name that landed on Perl5 because Perl6 was vaporware. The relationship between Perl6 and Moose is also well known and Moose led to an OO race that improved that space beyond measure. Then Plack came and reclaimed some lost ground. It did it by copying tools in Ruby and Python. Tools JAPHs coulda-woulda-shoulda written first.

Anyway, this is why I get crotchety on the topic. If you don’t like the state of Perl, go build something that will change it. Or stay and wail at the wake. It’s not ending any time soon and the food is pretty good after all.

Epilogue for those who haven’t heard Auntie Crankybritches stories three times already. The Java switch for Amazon service tools backfired massively and wasted $millions, 18 months, required complete retraining, led to a mostly Perl rewrite of the Java rewrite of the original Perl tools. The Ruby stuff also backfired, leading to an app outage on the eve of its use. It was also roundfiled. Not choosing Perl was a mistake and led to huge losses and a lot of internal bad will.