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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

Not to dispute the overall premise that Perl 6 did enormous damage to Perl, I want to interrogate this a little bit:

> There are many languages still in use today that have all kinds of warts and ugliness, but they remain in use because they still have momentum and lots of legacy things built in them. So being ugly or old isn’t enough of a factor for people to abandon something in droves.

Nothing forced anyone to abandon Perl 5 code, and I suspect most Perl 5 wasn't abandoned for its own sake; it was a Cambrian explosion of new greenfield projects rising out of the ashes of Web 1.0 that brought Python and Ruby and PHP to the forefront. It's just that a lot of the Perl 5 code out there in the world was quick and dirty CGI scripts that died naturally after the dotcom crash and as the web became more sophisticated.

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My take is a lot of that Web 1.0 stuff was total spaghetti code, hardcoded to a table layout, full of injection holes, etc etc. (It was like everyone did my first CGI script x 100.) So in that sense Perl wasn't any different than classic ASP or cold fusion or etc, it became associated with bad legacy code. And because there was no 'Perl 6', people had to choose something else.

(There's stuff about the perl language, but that's probably secondary.)

Yea, Perl thrived while there was no real alternative.

PHP arrived and ate into it's web app use-cases. Modperl wasn't great for hosted environments, to say the least.

Python matured and started eating into it's systems use-cases and eventually the web use-cases as well. And was just so much easier to work with and learn.

Perl was left with no real niche where it really shined, except one-liners and making poetry I guess

>>Nothing forced anyone to abandon Perl 5 code, and I suspect most Perl 5 wasn't abandoned for its own sake;

Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Prolog etc.

I was there when Perl ruled the world, I used it myself to rule the world. The scene was always managers going to the C++/Java teams and asking them an estimate to a get a project done. They would often come back with timeline spanning 1 - 3 years.

Perl teams would get it done in like a week.

Needless to say most non-Perl programmers wanted Perl gone for this one reason alone. Too powerful, people who know how to use it make too much progress compared to everyone else. Smaller teams making larger progress shrinking the head counts, which top bosses didn't like.

Programming world is a sea of mediocrity, good things mostly don't make it here.

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