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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

Without a "Major" sponsor, or a "Rails" type killer application, Perl 6, or indeed any language, will struggle to get significant traction.

It is of course possible to gain slowly over time, but with numerous languages competing, that path may be a dead-end.

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I agree here. If Perl 6 however gets anything close to Perl 5's Mojolicious it would be more than enough to switch to it. I haven't used Perl in many years, but it's by far the best web framework I've ever used. It's really thought out well, made all the right design decisions from the beginning and just really great code itself.

But such gems tend to be unique, also in completely different fields. And it probably wouldn't have been possible if the original developer hadn't been involved and gained experience through Catalyst, which is roughly Perl's take on Ruby on Rails.

If it got a bit more press in its early days, outside of the Perl community I think the world of web development could look very different today.

As I said I am not a Perl developer anymore (and don't focus on the web part anymore either), and I am sure there is a bit of nostalgia in those lines, but even though there are great frameworks in other languages, no doubt, there is impressive projects, I still didn't get something that allowed such a kind of rapid development and transitioning prototype applications into production services in such a seamless manner.

I think it's also a great example of Perl being very readable despite all the ugly scripts you find out there - of course also because a big bunch of it being written by non perl developers who just needed to get a script going. Just like with JavaScript and PHP.

It's funny though how the presence of a well done web application framework nowadays is considered the killer application in a pretty consistent way. I've seen that in various languages that weren't really made for web application programming as well. There is obvious reason, as it's the agreed upon API for most applications, however I wonder if this might not bring stagnation and kind of a cycle that only allows a certain way of thinking and developing to succeed, as standards and programming languages/frameworks co-evolve.

Perl 6 still has to overcome Perl 5, which is everywhere and is a great language. I never get around to using Perl 6 because 5 is already there in every Linux distribution.

I wish Linux distros shipped with more recent language versions, e.g. Python 3.6 and Perl 6 in addition to just 3.4/5 and 5. I understand that it's not their job to try and push people to update their language skills, but it'd be nice to have access to them right off the bat if they feel like it.

The difference between Python minor versions (e.g. 3.4 to 3.6) is tiny compared to the difference between Perl 5 and 6.

From what I've seen, the difference between Python 2.x and 3.x is tiny compared to the Perl 5/6 change.

I think the difference between Perl 5.10 (2007) and 5.26 (2017) is bigger than difference between the Python 2 of 2007, and Python 3 of 2017

The difference between Perl 5 and Perl 6 is probably about 10x the difference between Perl 5.10 and 5.26

I like to explain it this way:

Perl 4 is to C

as Perl 5 is to C++

as Perl 6 is to Haskell/Smalltalk/C#/Swift/Julia…

Then again I've got Perl code I wrote in the 90s that still runs untouched on the latest Perl 5. Much more recent Python 2 code (of mine) still won't run untouched under Python 3.

So I might agree actually on the "bigger", but the "noticeability" does have a lot to do with the general feeling.

(to be clear, I agree with all of your comment)

I'm not extremely familiar with Perl 6 to be able to draw a comparison.

From what I know about Python 2/3, it's that you can write maybe 90% on average/in general of your code the same way without much thought about the differences. However, if you do wish to adopt the new features, there's plenty to keep you busy writing scripts for at least a few months, maybe even a year.

Perl 6 is a different language from Perl 5. It's considered next in the "Perl family of languages". There are various things you can do to get interoperability between them, and run code from one in the other's interpreter, but the changes are much more pronounced that Python's 2->3 changes. It's closer to the difference between PHP and Perl 5. People familiar with Perl 5 will find a lot of the design decisions and concepts similar in Perl 6, but it will still be like learning a new, but similar, language to Perl 5.

python3.x vs 2.x is nowhere near the jump from perl5 to perl6.

It's basically a different language that shares some things, with few users. It would be nice to see it shopped, but you might as likely wish distribution shipped with crystal or nim.

Hey, it was a wish lol. I know we live in the real world here

Some do.

https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/python/

Red Hat 7.3 ships perl 5.16.3 - it's from 2013. 6.9 ships perl 5.10.1 from 2009.

    $ cat /etc/redhat-release
    CentOS Linux release 7.3.1611 (Core)

    $ yum info rakudo
    Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
    Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
     * base: mirror.team-cymru.org
     * epel: mirror.oss.ou.edu
     * extras: mirror.cloud-bricks.net
     * updates: mirror.atlantic.net
    Available Packages
    Name        : rakudo
    Arch        : x86_64
    Version     : 0.2017.04.2
    Release     : 1.el7
    Size        : 3.4 M
    Repo        : epel/x86_64
    Summary     : Perl 6 compiler implementation that runs on MoarVM
    URL         : http://rakudo.org/
    License     : Artistic 2.0
    Description : Rakudo Perl 6, or just Rakudo, is an implementation of the
                : Perl 6 language specification. More information about Perl 6 is available
                : from <http://perl6.org/>. This package provides a Perl 6 compiler built for
                : MoarVM virtual machine.

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