in reply to Should I come back to Perl?

Does anyone of you have a deeper, reasonable clue about what will happen with Perl 5 when Perl 6 has gained enough attraction?

You're really into crystal-ball territiory there. the best anyone could really do is to say what might happen.

Best case scenario: Perl6 is released on schedule but with a more sensible name like "PerlVM". Everyone loves it and it becomes widely used as a sane replacement for Java in those places where a bytecode VM is a sensible choice. Those who were using Java in entirely the wrong place re-evaluate their strategy and turn to Perl5 instead. Both languages grow in use and respect.

Worst case scenario: Perl6 is released in another 4 years or so under that name. Clueless bosses become dumber and insist that everyone using Perl5 "upgrades". The rewrites cause massive headaches for the devs and result in less efficient systems. Users of other languages say, "Perl? Didn't that used to be a language?" and carry on as before. Both languages suffer and die.

As usual with best/worst cases the actuality is likely to be somewhere in the middle. I would recommend anybody to concentrate on Perl5 as it is to my mind the single best language I have come across and really does deserve the Swiss Army Chainsaw tag. If you work in a bytecode VM environment (eg. phones) then of course consider Perl6/PerlVM (but don't bet the farm on it just yet).

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Re^2: Should I come back to Perl?
by jekyll (Acolyte) on Sep 11, 2015 at 12:16 UTC

    \o,

    actually, both of your scenarios lead to the final fall of Perl 5 as having the ex-Java crowd around rarely means an improvement for any language, right?

    Regards and all that,
    jkl
[reply]

      jekyll

      ...having the ex-Java crowd around rarely means an improvement for any language, right?

      I can confirm. I swear our simple Objective-C app has a CORBA server embedded in it just to populate 20-character read-only text fields. That's a mild exaggeration, but you get the idea. Put there by ex-Java heads, of course; I assume fleeing the world of Tomcat or some such.

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