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I was involved in Firefox marketing. If the actual Firefox story is the template, Perl 6 is poised for great success. The project that led to Firefox was started in 1993. It was called Netscape. (Let's say this is analogous with Perl 5.) In 1998 the project was reinvented as Mozilla. (Let's say this is analogous with Perl 6.) For much of the 7 years between early 1998 and late 2004 the Mozilla project (analogous with Perl 6) was lambasted by the masses for, first, failing to release anything, and then, when they did, releasing slow, buggy, bloated, irrelevant software. By 2003 Mozilla was being ignored by almost everyone. What saved Mozilla was that some smart engineers refused to bow to, on the one hand, public disinterest, and, on the other, internal pressure to focus on improving Mozilla 1.0. Instead they did yet another rewrite of several key parts, and then in early 2003 those still interested got behind the rewrite and the outcome was Firefox 1.0 in late 2004. The parallels with the Rakudo team's efforts are clear and I see scope for an analogous outcome. |