Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?
Because we aim for organic growth: not too fast and not too slow. Based on stats, our userbase doubled since last year; and that&#x27;s with an yet-to-be-optimized compiler that&#x27;s an order of magnitude slower than competitors and by some people&#x27;s standard not yet production ready.<p>It&#x27;ll also take a bit for people who loudly push 25-year-old languages like Python and Ruby like holy grail to... die off (no, I don&#x27;t want them to convert). Perl 6 is a next generation language over them and it&#x27;ll take next generation of programmers to make use of the new programming paradigms.<p>What you&#x27;re probably asking is why hasn&#x27;t Perl 6 went viral like Swift, Rust, or Go? Well, we don&#x27;t have a multi-million (or -billion) company backing us, so fanboys and people who are after the latest shiny things aren&#x27;t flocking to us like to manure. But look around this site: those langs get as much nonsensical comments from the Python-Ruby zealots who are too scared of new languages :)<p>Perl 6&#x27;s first production release was less than a year ago. It&#x27;s a bit unrealistic to expect it to be a &quot;poster child&quot; of anything so fast. If you&#x27;re old enough to remember, no one gave a shit about Python until at least second version.<p>Don&#x27;t worry about popularity. Learn many languages and use what you like using.