Nonsense. Perl was becoming the despised step child of programming languages and being rejected at all the big shops like Amazon and Yahoo *before* Perl6 was even conceived. I was at Amazon then and watched it unfold under the bootheel of Java and the giddiness for Ruby. Perl6 did, however, help with the resuscitation of Perl5 c 2005. None of the negativity or attacks on Perl6 here have ever helped Perl5 in the slightest; only increased acrimony and sent users like liz who had straddled and contributed to both worlds away.

Perl was becoming the despised step child of programming languages and being rejected at all the big shops like Amazon and Yahoo *before* Perl6 was even conceived.

Can you produce a reference for this? What is it about Perl that makes it so unsavory?

I knew that using perl wasn't making me popular, but I didn't think of it as a loadstone in that sense either....

This isn’t wikipedia. My reference is me. I was at Amazon when they decided Java was the way forward—because XML and Java was the future of all programming and coincidentally the first step to off-shoring—for all customer service code, 1999, and that rewriting *hundreds* of tools into Java made sense and doing new “experimental” stuff in Ruby was a good idea because Perl was a trainwreck of write only line noise. It was the same timeline Yahoo ditched Perl for PHP for its workaday stuff. Here is some perspective from the era: Beating the Averages.

Java, Python, and, to a much lesser degree, Ruby hackers spent a lot of energy putting Perl down back then. The ugly secret of the world—from programming to politics—is FUD works really well.

The specific genesis of Perl6 was exactly this atmosphere and growing distaste and backlash regarding Perl5.

Punchline at Amazon is that particular tool suite in Java crashed and burned after 18 months of wasting time and $millions and getting something like 20% code complete compared to the Perl/C tools that already existed and had taken about the same amount of time to write. The Java was also so slow it was halfway unusable and most employees took to using the old tools—instead of stalling customers on the phone for the five or ten minutes it took a tool to run—despite there being zero training or encouragement. The whole thing ended up being redone. In Perl. I wasn’t there for that and have no idea how long it lasted. Off-shoring started soon after that. I left the department over the issue and direction. The only reason I know that part of the story is two dummies who don’t understand corporate espionage at all talked about it two seats away for a half hour on a Seattle City bus.

Should be mentioned that Moose was modeled after Perl 6's OO model.

So there were many benefits from the analysis and visions behind Perl 6.

The question is rather: is p5p as an institution capable of having any visions?

IMHO was Perl 6 also an attempt to bypass the deadlocks there.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

I don't mean there shouldn't have been such a project, it just should have got a code name, not squat on the next version number.

Jenda
1984 was supposed to be a warning,
not a manual!

"The question is rather: is p5p as an institution capable of having any visions?"

You are so skilled at compiling so much arrogance and offensiveness into such a few words. Why not take some of your many suggestions, hypotheticals, and esoteric debate questions out of your REPL and over there and offer to help?



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.