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Comment by bitmadness | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late, IMO. The world has moved to Ruby and Go for the web/cloud and Python for data analysis/scientific computing.

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The 20-year-old Ruby and Python were brand new at some point in time too. It's a bit silly to declare the current crop of languages to be with us forever. I can already notice where being a brand new language makes Perl 6 address new inventions in the past 20 years much better: superb Unicode support and getting concurrency by simply using .hyper/.race methods, not to mention grammars and autothreaded junctions. This looks pretty revolutionary to me.

Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby.

WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME.

JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml.

iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language.

This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

The world is not a monoculture, yes. Not sure why that should mean people will start using this new version of a language that has been dormant for fifteen years.

Perl is still among the top 10 languages, according to TIOBE. Even if we discount that index, other indices have it in at least the top fifteen.

https://www.google.com/search?q=top+50+programming+languages

As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present , for example.

I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.

> I just don't see why that means people will use it.

I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations.

> The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!

I know literally hundreds of Perl developers in London alone. CPAN gets > 1,000 uploads a month. There have been regular releases that add features for years. The OO system provided by Moose puts most languages to shame... You have some odd definition of dormant.

I don't know, maybe because people like change and/or want to just try something new.

I came into programming little too late to even consider perl5. It's just something I've read through as part of setting up irssi script(s).

To me Perl6 seems fun based on the few things I've read and I don't see any reason not to give it a go. Sure I won't be using it in any "production" build anytime soon, but hey maybe its setup beats the hassle that ruby/rvm brings with it and maybe it's more fun than python.

> Stackoverflow was written in C# when the rest of the world had moved on to Ruby.

How are they feeling about that decision now?

> WhatsApp had clients written in Java against J2ME.

Sure, because Java is the only option on those platforms.

> JaneStreet is (apparently) killing it with OCaml.

OCaml hasn't hit its peak yet, it's still on the way (slowly) up.

> iOS apps were written in Objective-C when the rest of the world hardly even heard of that language.

Again, because it's the only option on the platform.

> This site is written in a niche dialect of Lisp.

How're they feeling about that decision now?

Few hipsters is not a "world", world is much bigger.

Ruby and Go for the web?? Really? Not JavaScript and PHP (still). Python is old hat too it's all about Julia now :P and R is making a come back in some weird computing renaissance.

Ruby is very popular with the excellent Rails framework. Also Sinatra as a DSL if the power of Rails isn't needed.

Imagine what DSL would look like in a programming language that is itself defined as several DSLs. That is signatures, immediate strings, regular expressions are all separate domain specific languages that share parts of the same grammar but with certain domain specific modifications.

There is a thing called a Slang where you can replace the Perl 6 grammar with a different one entirely. So you could write a Ruby slang and write Ruby in Perl 6. Unfortunately the design for slangs wasn't quite good enough yet for the Christmas release of ROAST the specification testsuite.

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