[pjungwir]

I'm curious if anyone really expected Perl 6 to arrive like the article describes ("The problem wasn't apparent in 2000."). I was just a junior programmer, and I loved 5.6, but from the beginning 6 sounded to me like it would be a wholly different language, probably never delivered, and certainly never adopted. Maybe I'm projecting, but I felt that was a broad sentiment back then. By 2001 I was writing Python half time or more, and even though I felt a great fondness for Perl while Python left me cold, it still felt like it delivered everything Perl 6 aspired to (if you could stand the lack of regex literals, grr.....). Once Ruby became popular we got all the good things of Perl without the aridity of Python, so there was even less reason to care. In the late '00s I took a few years off programming to do a degree in Classics, and I kept telling myself half-jokingly that if Perl 6 shipped I'd know I'd been away too long. When Parrot was released I figured I'd better get back in the game.

That's not to say Perl 6 wasn't needed. Among programming languages Perl was probably my first love, especially the linguistics tie-ins with $ @ % etc, but write-only was a real problem, and people were moving to Python on the one hand and Java on the other. Maybe PHP killed Perl for low-end cheap hosting, but for larger projects, among people who would never have considered PHP, it lost because picking it seemed irresponsible.

[CodeWriter23]

I started calling it out as vaporware around the Holidays 2001. I would be shouted down by certain zealots who would tell me code (pre-Alpha quality) was available for use right now.

At least there are people maintaining Perl 5 at this point.

[ugexe]

There are commits to Rakudo, a Perl 6 compiler, every day. It's also scheduled to be production ready by the end of 2015.

[cturner]

You might be right. But I have been reading forum posts to this effect for fifteen years, and eventually eveyone switches off. Even if you are right, would you trust your career focus to a software community who had got it this wrong for that long? I am looking forward to checking out a future perl 6 but part of that is now duke nukem forever curiosity - what on earth could be in it that kept those smart people at it for that long?

[pwr22]

Hmmm, they've never committed to a deadline or even tried to aim for a production release before this time, so it may turn out better than you'd expect

[chromatic]

they've never committed to a deadline

Baloney.

[pwr22]

Sorry, I didn't know was much as I thought I did