[cariaso]

I was a bioinformatician who worked on the Human Genome Project [ https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol1_2/tpj0102-0001.html ]. I used perl daily for years. In ~2004(?) I attended a San Francisco Perl Mongers User Group meeting where Randal Schwartz confirmed that Perl6 would sufficiently break backwards compatibility that the CPAN would be started from scratch. I walked out of that meeting and said out loud "oh well, I guess it's time to switch to python".

I firmly believe that it wasn't specifically about the switch to perl6, it was about the loss of the cpan that broke the camel's back.

[jlv2]

The whole "Perl 6 won't be backwards compatible" effectively took the wind out of the sails. If you force people to have to redo what they already have, that will give them an incentive to investigate other alternatives. Couple this with the 15 years of "Perl 6" going nowhere just opened the door for everything else to grow in it's place.

[dehrmann]

> I guess it's time to switch to python

Which would go one to have its own breaking change.

[raverbashing]

pip didn't start from scratch with Python 3, so the py2->3 was a much less breaking change

[the_only_law]

I had a minor interest in bioinformatics when I was a child and everything I would read about it pointed towards Perl beings pretty big tool. I toyed with the language a little around the time, probably couldn’t recall much now.