zlacker

You can break backwards compatibility, if you are careful.

In fact, Perl even had the tools to break backwards compatibility baked in from the v5 days.

I agree that Perl 6 is why perl died, but I think the thing that really killed it is what you mentioned. It was a completely different language that spend over a decade with a release date of "soon".

Who wants to work on a language that isn't being worked on because the next thing is AND where from what you know of the next thing everything will be a complete rewrite.

>>cogman+(OP)
A completely different language, a decade of development to Perl 6, and Python eating its lunch in the meantime. Perl is often called a write only language, and there's Python with

    for line in file:

If you were new to the field at that time, Python seemed like a no-brainer.

>>MegaDe+4b
Even as an experienced developer who even owned CPAN modules and was very familiar with the Unix ways, Python was a no-brainer.

I mention this on light of the article's claim that this has to do with "a new generation of programmers brought up on … I don’t know, Microsoft systems, Visual Basic and Java". No. The new languages that appeared were just so much much better.

>>afc+zg
When you have advantages that often come down to "it works great on a teletype over 150 baud" (read, compressed syntax, regex, etc) you will eventually be beaten by something that is easier to read at a glance.

Non-programmers read python and sometimes even Java and say "huh, this is something that could be figured out" - reading perl was reading line noise.

APL is probably one of the most powerful languages out there, but the characters in the syntax scare most away.