I don't remember there being anything about growing replacement clones, but it would make sense given the other tech in the story.

And you respond by saying that you can, but you need to do a _lot_ of work with him to spec this billing system out. You can't just build "a new billing system" without any more details. You tell him that this will take many hours of work between the two of you where you ask him questions, write a spec, get his feedback, and repeat that a number of times.

At this point, he says "wow, that sounds like a ton of of work for me just get started", and he gives up.

AI does not fix any of this, and this is the thing that I think most people will not want to do, and that's why I think this blog post is making a very good point. The amount of work it takes to build a new software system, even with a super competent programmer as a partner, is still quite significant. And it requires thinking about hundreds of tiny little details in a way that drives a lot of people nuts. They will only do it if they _really_ have to do it.

My personal favorite is probably Family Mart, because they have multiple very delicious vegan rice balls to choose from.

PHP? I don't know how widely it's still used, but I'd guess it's more widely used than Perl. Also, PHP is not "as bad" as Perl. It's much, much, much worse. It's Perl without the charm.

This lack of flexibility means that it's impossible to experiment with replacements for built-ins, and the lack of generics out of the gate meant so many things were simply impossible (like useful iterators).

Compare this to Rust, where almost everything like this is just a trait. If you want to offer a map replacement, you just implement the Index and IndexMut traits.

Overall, I don't think Perl is the best language design. It has some interesting ideas. Go is _also_ not the best language design. Is Rust the _best_? No, but it's better than both Perl and Go, IMO.

I assume you disagree with the blog post, not with my comment, since this is exactly what my comment says too!

1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).

2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.

3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.

And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.

Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.

All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.