What Happened to Perl 7?
I’m disappointed in the way this Perl 6 v Perl 7 debate is developing. Perl 6 modernizes Perl with e.g. concurrent and reactive programming, built-in grammars and a reimagined regex syntax superior to legacy PCRE, named function arguments, and gradual typing.<p>Perl 6 was designed to be the successor language to Perl 5.<p>The only <i>technical</i> grounds for Perl 6 being metaphorically sidelined was because Perl 6 lacked the startup and runtime performance characteristics of Perl 5 — <i>fixable problems</i>.<p>Proponents of Perl 5 often contend Perl could’ve escaped developer mindshare loss without Perl 6 in the picture. But to claim Python, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust and JS&#x2F;TS never would’ve gained serious developer mindshare had _Perl 6_ not existed seems very myopic to me. All the brilliant new languages and web frameworks launching were bound to erode Perl’s early established dominance regardless.<p>Things would be different now if Perl 6 was at least as performant as Perl 5. Perhaps then it would’ve become popular years ago amongst Perl users to switch all greenfield Perl code to Perl 6. Then “Perl” would’ve become synonymous with modern language features.