Perl was the workhorse of the early web, when I was a young programmer interested in the web it seemed like the most worthwhile language I could learn. Perl isn't dead but it's lost most of its appeal, and a large part of that is due to the failed development on Perl 6.
Yeah, but that's not really the same as what has happened in the Python community where Python 3 has been available for so long but there's still resistance to making the shift.
Incomplete implementations of Perl 6 that are identified as pre-final releases are available right now (and have been for some time), but that's different from a general release. A "complete" release is planned for this Christmas; its a very different situation than Python 3, which has had stable releases for several years, including several feature releases after the first stable release.
I don't think it's fair to characterize Rakudo Perl 6 as incomplete, at least on the MoarVM backend. It is very nearly complete, with the bulk of the semantics fixed in years past. It is currently passing 122627 tests[1]. If you write code today, it will probably not break by December.
I guess it still counts as unstable software, but I used Gmail beta for half a decade and that turned out fine. At this point, its a matter of nomenclature, because I've certainly used buggier "final release" software.
> I don't think it's fair to characterize Rakudo Perl 6 as incomplete, at least on the MoarVM backend.
Look, I think Rakudo Perl 6 is great, and its quite usable for many things. OTOH, I think it is quite fair to refer to it as "incomplete", because:
> It is very nearly complete
"very nearly complete" is a kind of "incomplete".
You can't really make a fair comparison to Perl 6 uptake before even the Perl project is calling Perl 6 "ready" with Python 3 uptake 7 years after PSF said Python 3 was ready.
Perl was the workhorse of the early web, when I was a young programmer interested in the web it seemed like the most worthwhile language I could learn. Perl isn't dead but it's lost most of its appeal, and a large part of that is due to the failed development on Perl 6.