I wish I could be confident that Perl 7 was actually going to see the light of day. Honestly, I was extremely excited when they announced it, and hoped it could make a real difference. The lack of real status information since then (even past the proposed initial release date) along with the implosion of the a lot of the core community and steering, is honestly what finally broke me from thinking anything could be salvaged for the future.
If Perl 7 is actually still coming and there's real progress there, then there's a spectacular messaging fail going on.
Perl's been my go-to language for well over 20 years, and it's the first thing I reach for when writing anything new. The problem is I'm having a harder and harder time justifying that decision. I built something small with Deno for the first time a few months back because I both wanted to try out typescript and I wanted something that I could easily turn into an executable on windows. The built in features (compile to an executable, limited security exposure based on runtime flags) and the ability to go far past JS because it as TypeScript built in all put a lot of stuff with Perl in stark relief. These are features you get when you have people actively trying to solve people's problems, iterating on substantial new and better things, and you have users (or potential users) with problems to solve. Perl 7 is/was possibly Perl's last chance to pull itself out of the ashes and try to offer something new to pull new people in and bring old users back, and I'm just not sure there's enough of a community left to pull it off. That's extremely sad, but ignoring it won't make it any less true as I see it. Hopefully I'm wrong.
If Perl 7 is actually still coming and there's real progress there, then there's a spectacular messaging fail going on.
Perl's been my go-to language for well over 20 years, and it's the first thing I reach for when writing anything new. The problem is I'm having a harder and harder time justifying that decision. I built something small with Deno for the first time a few months back because I both wanted to try out typescript and I wanted something that I could easily turn into an executable on windows. The built in features (compile to an executable, limited security exposure based on runtime flags) and the ability to go far past JS because it as TypeScript built in all put a lot of stuff with Perl in stark relief. These are features you get when you have people actively trying to solve people's problems, iterating on substantial new and better things, and you have users (or potential users) with problems to solve. Perl 7 is/was possibly Perl's last chance to pull itself out of the ashes and try to offer something new to pull new people in and bring old users back, and I'm just not sure there's enough of a community left to pull it off. That's extremely sad, but ignoring it won't make it any less true as I see it. Hopefully I'm wrong.