[cwyers]

Late to having a large, committed community and momentum. 15 years ago, Perl was Real Big (although I think even then PHP was starting to eat its lunch). If you launched Perl 6 then, you had a lot of active Perl projects you could talk into switching. Now, Perl 6 is Just Another Language, and it faces most of the struggles any new language/runtime would face, plus the added burden of carrying everyone's preconceptions about what Perl is along with it.

[ugexe]

This is not Perl 5. They are not the same language. Any whatever language you currently favor is Just Another Language that will be (or has been) displaced by [Current Fad Language]. Perl 6 hasn't even had its "Show HN: flappy bird/blog platform/etc" flavor-of-the-month phase yet, and you still claim its too late for the language? You come off as someone who does not want to expand their developer tools, because there is no reason to make the vague "claims" you have.

[chromatic]

Perl 6 hasn't even had its "Show HN: flappy bird/blog platform/etc" flavor-of-the-month phase yet, and you still claim its too late for the language?

After almost 15 years in development, surely that lack should indicate something.

[b2gills]

I'm actually glad it took this long.

If it didn't it would probably be like all these other new languages which only attempt to improve upon the art of programming in one or two aspects.

Another good thing about it taking so long is that it took a few tries before anyone figured out a decent way to implement Perl6. If everybody had just settled for the first halfway decent implementation, we would have been bridled with a language that was half as good as it could be. And the worst thing about that is that there would be people relying on the features the way they were implemented then, making it far harder to break backwards compatibility and get here in as little time as it has so far taken. ( There is still at least one big breakage that will come before Perl6 is officially released )

That's ignoring a few stumbling blocks like illness and some mismatch between the goals of Parrot and Rakudo. Without which it could have been done possibly 5 years sooner.