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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK#Match_pattern_from_command...
#!/bin/sh
pattern="$1"
shift
awk '/'"$pattern"'/ { print FILENAME ":" $0 }' "$@"
RIGHTS imm & def
RIGHT$ (sexpr, aexpr)
...
PRINT RIGHT$ ("APPLESOFT" + "WARE", 8)
SOFIWARE
> It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/
> Now, however it was initially intended, I think BASIC turned out to be one of the first major scripting languages, especially the extended version that DEC put onto its minicomputers called BASIC/PLUS, which happily included recursive functions with arguments. I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I’m permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right.
... but it wasn't without previous examples that Perl went the way that it did with sigils.
I was able to reason my way through these things and had luck writing reasonably large Perl programs. It did absolutely zero to help make devs' lives easier, though.
I would also contend that given the tools at the time (vt100 terminals without syntax highlighting being prevalent systems) sigils made it easier to write more on a line, provided easier visual recognition (for those familiar with the language) about the syntax, and provided for a more easily written lexer.