Ask HN: Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?
Perl <i>was</i> the poster child of scripting languages. When I started hacking on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s (before there was a Perl 5), it was a miracle language. I was throwing out multi-thousand line C programs wholesale and replacing them with 50 line Perl scripts that worked far better (daemons and Sybase reports, mostly).<p>Around 2000-2001, I worked on Perl 5 in a close-knit team at a dotcom startup. Even with daily interaction, it was really hard to keep coding standards straight and readability under control. The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer. Its flexibility leads to arcane code that can only be easily understood by the person who wrote it.<p>Years later, in different roles, I&#x27;ve worked extensively with both Ruby and Python (I prefer Ruby). I will never, ever, ever go back to Perl for anything more than one line long. I still use Perl for &#x27;perl -e&#x27; one-liners in the shell, mostly complex greps. That&#x27;s it. If I write anything small enough that structure doesn&#x27;t matter, I use &#x2F;bin&#x2F;sh. If I write something large enough that structure matters, I use Ruby.<p>Why? Because I like to be able to read my code.<p>Ruby is wonderfully expressive. It can do everything Perl can, and it does it in a much more readable, much more human way.