My (fairly large, well known, London-based) company is casting out Perl in favour of Ruby. Even though we have 0 Ruby expertise in house, several Perl programmers, and plenty of Perl stuff in place. One of the main reasons is the difficulty in recruiting Perl programmers, or in working with consultancies who don't deal with Perl at all. (I think there may also be some misconceptions about how much of an advantage Ruby gives you over Perl as well, a lot to do with the quality of our existing Perl code base, some of which is 10 years old, and a source of pain).
The reality of programming languages (and lots of things in business) is that just because X is better than Y, doesn't mean X will be successful, especially if Y is new (but mature), cool, has peripheral advantages (like lots of people using it, quantity beats out quality too), and the meme that Y is better than X is widespread, regardless of whether it's true (Ruby is the successor to Perl, according to some people).
I don't think Perl 5 will ever get back that "mindshare". Perl 6, on the other hand, could end up being either:
- A white elephant - not in the right time/place to make a huge impact, and not useful enough or too complicated for it to replace the usual Perl 5 niches
- Continue where Perl 5 is now, and replace a lot of the niches it currently occupies, plus expanding into a few more, but not really progressing.
- Be exactly what everyone is looking for, create the right amount of buzz, and rival some of the "big players".
I have no doubt Perl 6 will be a thing of beauty when it is finally ready for production use. But I don't think that guarentees it's success (in terms of how widely it's used, especially for commercial/enterprise use). I don't think the people involved are really too worried about these things, they just want to create something awesome (which, paradoxically, is often the way to make something popular).
Perl 6 is probably the only hope we have of Perl regaining the status it had in the "enterprise" in the late '90s. And even if it did that, it would be the first language (AFAIK) to make that sort of comeback.
(For the record, I hope it does :)
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