Perl 6.0 Might Finally Be Released This Year

[Delgarde]

Perl 6's development is not driven by a need to produce quarterly market share numbers. It's driven by the desire to create a language that is fun and efficient to develop with. And that will still be fun and relevant decades from now. Learning Perl 6 is not a matter of following the latest trend that's gonna be different in two years, but a long standing investment in a good and solid base.

Development might not be fueled by a need for market share, but it's success has to be. In Perl 5, you had a scripting language that absolutely dominated the UNIX world, but it stagnated - they've been pushing out new Perl 5 releases for many years, but there's been little real improvements to the language in a long time. And so it lost mindshare - people like me who used to use Perl for everything, abandoned it in favour of the better choices that became available. When I started using Linux, Perl was the #1 choice for doing almost anything that didn't require C - but now, I could just about get by without installing it. At work, we used to have a ton of old Perl scripts for various operations - most of them bit-rotted as the number of Perl developers in the company declined, and the important ones have been written in languages that people actually care about.

So what does Perl 6 do? Sure, maybe some of the people still using Perl 5 will upgrade, and I'm sure they'll be happier for having done so. But I don't know anyone who's interested in learning Perl anymore, and I don't think 6 will change that. From what I've seen of the differences, it just isn't enough... some nice features compared to 5, but nothing that makes Perl 6 look attractive to the people who have long been using other languages. It's too little, too late.

[hoohoo]

Your numbers have nothing at all to do with popularity. They are just that: numbers of repos on Github. <snip>

Obviously PERL6 is so concise and easy to use that it is pointless committing or pushing any code written in it.