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.
Once you need to rewrite everything, there’s no reason to stay with something you know since you need to fully retool anyway.
As a Perl programmer since v5 was released, the confusion around 6 completely destroyed almost everyone’s enthusiasm, and immediately caused all new projects to avoid Perl. It seemed like 5 had reached the end of the line, and 6 was nowhere to be found. Nobody wants to gamble so many hours of their lives, and the future of their business, on such an uncertain environment.
If Perl 6 had any visible movement within the first few years, it might have survived, but it was a good decade before they even admitted Perl 6 might take longer than expected, and then more time after that before they admitted it should have been a new language. 6 was interesting for language geeks, and they probably did some cool things, but you can’t run a large popular project like it’s a small research project. That completely destroyed all momentum in the community. Perl 5 development only resumed far too late, after the writing was already on the wall.
Both Bill Gates and Linus understand backwards compatibility as a sacrosanct principle. Python only just barely survived the jump from 2 to 3. JavaScript can only survive this because there’s no other option in a browser.
Right, but there aren't many with the kind of ugliness associated with real-world Perl code.
Not unlike Rust's borrow checker but at least with Rust you know what you're being promised.
Which is covered in the very first section of the course book? Yes it has its own logic. So do lots of programming languages.
How far do we need to take "not reading the doc"? That the very first chapter is too far? People who gave up on perl because of that... really would not have survived the rest of the course anyway?
There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.
> People who gave up on perl because of that... really would not have survived the rest of the course anyway?
I didn't give up on it, I just didn't feel the need to stick with it. I switched to something else that required less of a context switch when going back, awk or jq or Python.
Now, jq is something that throws me off every time I use it. But it's a completely different processing model, whereas lists and hashes are not specific to Perl.
So, to touch on that, no contest that for a while now, you can have a well paying job only writing python. (And perhaps even never going through a formal course on it.) That has worked for many people.
> There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.
Eh. Sigils are even more present / visible in perl 6. And other compact notation devices. All the way to making up your own unicode-based line noise when it serves. Which it does.