Why Perl Didn't Win

It is a different departure, and it isn't a 1:1 comparison. That's true.

But Python3 is an obvious failure and no one is admitting it, yet. I've seen claims from the core dev team about how Python3 is doing well because it has more downloads from Python.org, which is so stupid I won't even address it. A comparison of PyPI download statistics says it all.

Python3 migration had many ridiculous ways of pushing people to migrate. The answer for Python3's adoption was always something new. It reads like the list of reasons for invading Iraq.

Originally (and today's) overly optimistic EOL for Python2, then automated code conversion utilities, then porting all the major libraries, then 'six' type libraries to allow an ugly PythonX middle ground, then adding 3.x-only new features as a carrot, now the bright idea from the core dev team is to focus on pushing Python3 as the default install on distros. They all failed. Python3 as default on most distros won't do anything either.

All that said, and I think this is the best-case scenario: Python3 will survive and eventually thrive. It will just be a shadow of Python's former glory.

Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling? For Zeus' sake, I wouldn't think so. This coming from someone who agrees with the change in theory.

Speaking as someone who lived through this period during the formative years of my programming career, the author has completely missed the most influential language of the time and, in my mind at least, the number reason why Perl lost.

Yes, I'm talking about Java. It's easy to hate now, but Java back then replaced all the server-side Perl programming that I did in the space of about 3 years, from 1994 where CGI programming was king to 1995 and the applets craze to 1999 when I was still regularly having conversations with people about the benefits of Java vs Perl to 2001 when you were actively hurting your career by not learning Java (not least because it seemed like the only people hiring were doing enterprise Java with horrible things like EJB and CMP/BMP).

Why did Java beat Perl? Well, there's a lot to that -- but at least part of it has to do with that fact that Java was simpler and didn't have nearly as many tricks up its sleeves (also known as the write-only problem). This is similar to the argument people today make when picking Go over other options like Scala. I also don't think it hurt that Java came out of Sun, which on the one hand was extremely influential because they sold the hardware everyone with money used, but on the other wasn't influential at all because they were "big iron" to the web's "why would I buy a Sparcstation when I can just put a PC under my desk?"

Fundamentally, though, Java was very successful at becoming the language you wrote code in if you wanted to be taken seriously as a software engineer building web applications and you didn't already have 5+ years of C++ experience. Perl programmers didn't get the same respect, and so Perl died.

> Is that -really- worth forcing unicode handling?

I dunno. I'm new to Python (version 2 so far) and I easily spend 25-50% of my coding time fighting with ascii/unicode issues in Python. I wish Python 2.x just did something smarter.

Similar, but not quite as bad, is the need for me to put str() around non-string values in concatenation. Just f'ing doing it for me. I'll write a bunch of code, put together a message in a concatenation only to have it blow up at run-time because of this.

sigh I really miss Perl's implicit behaviors sometimes.

I dunno, maybe this all is making me a better programmer and person, forcing me to really deal with Unicode now, and breaking me of lots of Perl bad habits. But it's really one of the sucky parts of the language.

There's some days, after spending half the day fighting with this issue, that I almost decide to dump the whole thing and switch to Python 3.

@bane - can I ask why you don't switch to Python 3?

You know what rocked? Perl 4.

I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous!

Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" syntax rendered it basically unreadable, without adding much useful functionality. The layers of syntax options forced teamwork-driven Perl (I wrote about 10k lines of it) to pay close attention to coding standards, closer than more consistent languages, just to not step on each other or have fights.

Then along came Python and Ruby, which shared most of the benefits of Perl (scripting, mostly), but added very clean, elegant OO syntax. Everyone who actually cared about writing decent OO scripts switched. Plus Python had much better math libs, and Ruby soon had Rails.

And Perl 6? Fourteen years and nothing to show for it, and it'll have to be backwards compatible to all the things violently wrong with Perl 5. There's no use case that isn't already covered by Python and Ruby. Unless some new technology comes along and Perl jumps in firstest with mostest (like Ruby did with Rails), no one will really care.

The average age of Perl programmers has been increasing by about one year per year since 2002 or so. I don't see that changing anytime soon.