| IMO: Maturity: Perl 6 was released a little under a year ago. That's not long, and the leading implementation has not yet caught up with the standard (though work is ongoing). The ecosystem isn't quite there yet either. Examples: People can be really bad at imagining value in the right things - they need to see it. There hasn't been a very compelling killer app yet. Perception: People conflate Perl 6 with Perl 5. (Reasonably!) Most people remember TIMTOWTDI and remember that it was a bad thing, or at least that they prefer the Zen of Python. Most of all, they remember trying to read bad code. I don't think that Perl encourages bad code, but it sat in spaces that had lots of bad code already. (Lots of code made by people who are not programmers.) There are also codebases in Perl that are very well made, and easy to read. But we are better at remembering bad things. Again, IMO, Perl 5's biggest problem was the surprising language. I could write something that was legal code, but had different semantic value than I thought, and the language was littered with cases like that. It was common to think that Perl was to complex for any one programmer to know. Perl 6 isn't like this - the entire language is composed of simple components (at least, simple for their problem domains). It's also littered with good ideas that don't exist in other languages, like their regexen and grammar support. Everything else in the language is still top notch, like unicode handling and concurrency. Basically, it is the things around the language, not the language itself. I think it is telling that people saying they don't want to use the language are saying "Perl sucks" rather than "I don't like feature X" or "This construct is confusing". (I remember Eevee saying that "Perl 6 is truly the realization of Perl 5’s mission: to be startlingly consistent, and also just plain startling." I think that when people look at Perl 6, they'll be startled. But when they are no longer surprised, they'll just find powerful consistency.) |