davorg

Let's not forget that Perl 6 was announced because Perl 5 usage was already stagnating. Perl 6 was supposed to fix that problem. But it ended up making it worse.

> The backwards incompatibility of Perl 6 absolutely killed Perl.

I think the backwards incompatibility was a minor issue compared to how long it took for Perl 6 to be released. It was eighteen years from the announcement to the first (just barely) usable release. And for a lot of that time, I was hearing tech leads say things like "we don't want to start this project in Perl 5 if Perl 6 is just around the corner."

At some point, they changed the narrative from "Perl 6 is the next version of Perl" to "Perl 6 is a sister language to Perl" - but they should have renamed it at that point instead of waiting another 5 years.

It's worth remembering that the Perl 6 project was started because Perl usage was stagnating. But the project was so badly managed that it killed off both Perl 5 and Perl 6 (now renamed Raku).

I want to teach myself modern CSS. Other people might find it useful too.

> The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl

What does that mean? Perl's basic OO support (using blessed hash references) was introduced with Perl 5 in 1994. I have no idea how anyone would even attempt writing OO code in Perl 4.

I wrote the book that I wish had been available when I started using GitHub Actions

Hey, it worked for the COBOL crowd 25 years ago :-)

> I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks.

Exactly, the second wave of dotcom software was largely written using frameworks that built on the mistakes we'd been making in the first wave.

And because, so many programmers had memories of horrible experiences trying to beat Perl/CGI applications into submission, it was probably too late for Perl even then - although a large number of excellent Perl tools (Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit, Moose, PSGI to name just a few) were emerging at about the same time as Ruby on Rails or Django.

> Perl never had this kind of traction afaik - yes many scripts were written on Perl but not many .com companies were based on it.

Were you around for the first (pre-2000) dotcom boom? From where I was sitting (freelancing in London) it sometimes seemed that all of the first wave of dotcom companies were writing their apps in Perl.

In fact, I've often thought that a lot of Perl's current bad reputation stems from this generation's CTOs and dev managers being people who suffered writing those Perl web apps at a time when no-one knew how any of this stuff was supposed to work and careful design went out the window in the rush to get things to market before the bubble burst.

I'm semi-retired. I have a part-time contract maintaining a system I worked on a few years ago and I pick up other bits of freelance work from time to time.

And I've been prototyping a few project ideas (in Perl) to see if any of them could be a sustainable source of passive income. Of course, if any of them grow to the extent that they need a development team, I'll need to rewrite them in a more sustainable language.

Speaking as a London-based freelancer specialising in Perl, I can tell you that the number of companies developing new systems in Perl is tiny (like, maybe, half a dozen).

Until four or five years ago, there was still plenty of maintenance work to be had, but even that has pretty much dried up now.