This is the point that I can't get anyone to see. So what if they provide history? They can take it away at any point too. So what have you accomplished?!
Perl 6 looks very promising. It was an attempt to brush up Perl 5 but became its own language with a very unfortunate name (read: Perl 6 will not replace Perl 5). It has some very interesting features, including the built-in concurrency primitives and the oft-mentioned grammars.
It is still very new (from a release time perspective). I don't expect there are very many large-scale real-world usages yet. I do wish that the Perl 6 community would spend a little more time on advocacy but thankfully there are several books on the way and hopefully that will start breaking out of the echo chamber and introducing the language to the masses.
Those presentations were abhorrent and the conference should be embarrassed for giving such a buffoon the stage (twice!). He doesn't know the language and then lampoons it when he gets it wrong. Here are some rebuttals (one of which is mine) to the second talk https://gist.github.com/preaction/978ce941f05769b064f4. There are other rebuttals for the first one which can be found without too much difficulty.
I think the biggest problem Perl6 faces now is the perception that it is unfinished. This is mostly a problem of their own making. The language was in development for 15 years! In that time people got it drilled into their head that it wasn't done yet and likely would never be.
While this perception did hurt Perl5 it seems to have also hurt itself since reading this thread and seeing the number of people saying that it is "still in progress" or "still changing". This brings me to my second point, and the one that frustrates me more.
In fact Perl6 was released as stable 1.0 on Christmas of 2015. You could be excused for not noticing it. There were a few articles in a few technical journals in the months leading up tot he release but mostly the release day went by completely unnoticed and barely remarked upon.
Perl6 is a spectacular achievement! A language designed over the course of 15 years with the extreme flexibility and malleability to last 100 years more. This could have been a news story, a big release party, lots of hype, press releases. A language in the works for 15 years, it must be great right!?
Instead, to keep with an in-joke about "released by Christmas" it was released on Christmas day by developers who had family plans to a community that was busy with their own. I doubt many people know it happened. Indeed this thread seems proof of that.
Its not everyday that a 15 year project is completed. What an opportunity for exultation, and good press, wasted.
I agree. When I first starting trying to use perl 6 (after it was fully released) and had questions, most of the replies to those questions I found were from 10 years ago, when the answer was "XYZ... but it's not finished yet". The ecosystem has 15 years of outdated documentation still floating around, and they need to organize the current documentation in a way that's helpful to new developers.
For the last year, I've seen you several times re-iterate that point that just-if and if-only the handful of volunteers who drive this project made some sort of a massive media spectacle then everyone and their brother would be using Perl 6 these days.
Sorry, but that's just wishful thinking. We don't have infinite resources or infinite number of volunteers. Maybe instead of endless critique, you could offer a helping hand. You did want to at one point: https://irclog.perlgeek.de/mojo/2016-10-09#i_13366119
And by the way, no I'm really not interested in generally helping with a language I don't use. What I object to is the Perl6 community siphoning off Perl5 oxygen and then using it to do nothing. I WAS willing to help ... in the moment that it would have helped. Its too late now, I'm not sure how Perl6 gets the spotlight again when it so perfectly eschewed it when one was waiting to shine on it.
You'll notice that that irc log is just me saying october what I'm saying now. The release was botched. Had I had any idea of the lackluster release that was to come I would have helped. This is a better log to read IMO: http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2015-12-24#i_11771099
It doesn't matter what people say when they dislike the language. Certainly not for other new languages, they still get adopted as long as they offer enough value. These days for most people Perl 6 just doesn't, expectations are too different and too high for it to meet and no PR is going to fix that.
