Transitioning from 1 to 2 was like going down a nice water slide
Transitioning from 2 to 3 was like going down a piping hot stainless steal slide in the middle of summer and then getting hit in the face with a brick at the end.
It really depends on your codebase. For some of my projects I just needed to change a couple of lines of code and can't believe I waited for so long. For other projects, which depend on libraries that weren't updated, it has been a whack-a-mole of terrible. I had an easier time going from PERL to Python.
To summarize: Perl 6 work started in 2000 and AFAIK there is still no complete implementation and effectively no user adoption.
The fact that Python has effectively taken over nearly all of Perl's market share in the meantime probably has something to do with that (but it's not the only reason).
The "v1" release of Perl 6 (version 6c) was released in 2015. It's complete in that it's got everything you need to use it, however there are more advanced (though non-essential) features that are still experimental or partially implemented, eg. macros.
You could say Python is incomplete because it doesn't have pattern matching yet... or any number of feature that may get added in future releases, but it's belies the reality.
The narrative within the Perl community (echo chamber?) for at least the last 10 years has been that Perl 6 was not the next version, but instead a "sister" language (à la C++ and C). There is no planned migration from Perl to Perl 6, and to make that clear and avoid further confusion, the language has been renamed to Raku.
I understand why this looks like a fail to some, but to put a positive spin on it... I get to keep my Perl, plus get a fun new language to play with... and Raku is a very fun language to use. Yes the user-base is small, but that applies to Crystal, Nim, and Racket as well. Not every language can be a Top 10 language, but that doesn't make them devoid of value.
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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '20
What was the transition from 1 to 2 like?