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Comment by dmerrick | Hacker News Reader

Perl 6 was too little, too late. It was hyped for a long time and delayed for a long time. During that time, everybody who was impatient and not forced to use Perl ended up moving to the new hotness languages like Python and Ruby.

Ruby is probably the main reason Perl lost so much market share, since it took a lot of the underlying philosophies from Perl and turned it into a beautiful, easy-to-read language.

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I started using Perl in the early 90s and Ruby in 2005. I keep reading that Ruby was inspired by Perl and even Matz says that, so it's true. However the Perlish sugar on Ruby is so thin that I'm not really sure I see it. The regexp syntax? Yes, it's the most distinctive feature of Perl to me together with the while(<>) loop, but that's very minor. The influence of Smalltalk is much more marked but in general Ruby is its own language with its own flavor, much easier to read and write than any other language I used.

I kept writing quick throw away text processing scripts in Perl until a few years ago, when I started to forget how to write the basic constructs due to lack of use. I'm writing them in Ruby now but I think that Perl was better suited to the task. At least I can read the Ruby ones years later.

But am I giving a try to Perl 6? No, I don't even know how it looks like. What problem would be solving for me? Who else is using it and for what? Can I go to a customer and say let's use Perl 6 for this project, don't worry you'll find many other developers to carry on development if I won't be available anymore? Not yet.

I was a Perl dev in the 90s, have since used PHP, Ruby, node and Python and I must agree that there is something "perl like" in Ruby. I don't know what it is, maybe it's the feeling of naturalness when writing, maybe the fact that "there is more than one way of doing it", but despite the languages between quite different Ruby is the closest to Perl that I know. Except that I can actually read it quite well even months after I have written something.

So is Python.

Well, if you wanted "Perl, only better", you went with Ruby. Python is good, but it has a different flavor.

You read this part:

> turned it into a beautiful, easy-to-read language.

and got annoyed (presumably?) that Python wasn't mentioned, but you completely ignored:

> it took a lot of the underlying philosophies from Perl

Ruby is a lot closer to Perl than Python is, which is what the draw would be for people migrating away from Perl.

Thanks, this is precisely what I intended.

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