So today we learn that Perl 6 isn’t vaporware. Really?
Look, chromatic is the man, but c’mon. Perl has ceded nearly all momentum to Ruby, Python, and PHP. I can’t deliver code in Perl 6 to customers and expect it to be as reliable, safe, and generally production-ready as I can with Perl 5 (or PHP or Ruby or Python). Also,
Heck, PHP 5 is barely not vaporware, if you look at installed base among $4.95- a-month virtual hosting plans.
This is just bullshit: you can’t call php5 “barely not vaporware” because shitty hosts are lazy. Not to mention PHP (the implementors) actually took up a project to convince people to upgrade. Does any such effort exist for Perl 6? One that can clearly enumerate what’s wrong with perl 5 and why it’s important I start upgrading now? No? PHP can.
The basis of the “it’s not vaporware argument” is that it exists and is not merely a fiction of the marketing department (something chromatic claims doesn’t exist for perl – I’m sure Steve Yegge disagrees with you); a commenter in the thread decides that it’s not vaporware because “vaporware means it’s fiction. It’s not. It exists, it just isn’t done.”
Perhaps next, good commenter, we can argue over the what you mean by “it”.
(whew – made it this far w/o a Duke Nuke’em Forever reference.)
Perl will always be my “first girlfriend”, that changed my life and made me a man. That said I am not married to said girlfriend for a reason – sometimes it’s time to move on, you know?
