Perl 6 is vaporware. Python 3 is here, it's widely supported, it's faster than Python 2.7, and while Guido didn't do us any favors with his migration strategy, I don't see what the big deal is. Python 3.3 makes writing code that is compatible with both almost trivial.
People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the scales.
Perl 6 and Duke Nukem Forever are the geriatric poster children of vaporware, and always will be, even after they finally shipped. Being able to pick up a turd floating in a urinal does not in any way deliver on all the broken promises, rehabilitate the ruined reputation, or make up for all the blustering hype that was spewed for so many years about how superior Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay would be to all the other games that were already on the market. The damage was done a long time ago, and can never be undone. And Perl 6 is perfectly analogous to Duke Nukem Forever. Fortunately, nobody ever made such ridiculous claims about Python 3 as were made about Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6.
Well, if they are programming languages, are still unstable 10 years late, have near zero adoption and are missing half of the promised features, then yes.
Unfortunately languages like Rust perfectly fit your definition. Because Rakudo was started around the same time as Rust and Rust is aiming for may be 1% of the feature set Perl 6 aims to achieve.
That's moving the goalposts a bit! What's currently called "Rakudo" is at least the sixth or seventh attempt at an implementation, not counting Pugs, viv, v6, or Niecza.
Rust appeared publicly as a project to build a language in 2010 (it was a personal, private, project kept under wraps by Graydon a few years before which is irrelevant).
Perl 6 was first started on 2000. I've been reading Larry's apocryphal descriptions of its "features to be" for 4 times more years than Rust exists.
Rakudo is just a particular attempt at Perl 6, not the first and neither it consists of first time the language was announced publicly.
I remember Larry also saying(On a youtube video, may be at the O'reilly conference) that he has been working on Perl 6 since 1987. That's how he wishes to describe it.
Therefore I'm not sure what you've been reading, or if you are even reading them. Because if you would- you would know, Rakudo covers much of the Perl 6 specification.
By the way. Rust is still not complete. The wikipedia article says, work started in 2006- Which makes it 8 years and still incomplete. And this is for a project which has by far may be even 1000x modest goals. Python 3 was itself 10 years in development, and that is for small modifications to print statement and iterators. And even after 5 years since that date, it doesn't seem to have come any where closer to achieving good production scenario adoption.
And. These are- I said by far extremely modest goals compared to the Perl 6 project.
>I remember Larry also saying(On a youtube video, may be at the O'reilly conference) that he has been working on Perl 6 since 1987. That's how he wishes to describe it.
That's all well, but he announced it circa 2000. I don't care how he feels about it or how long he hacked it alone, I care since when the language was expected.
Therefore I'm not sure what you've been reading, or if you are even reading them. Because if you would- you would know, Rakudo covers much of the Perl 6 specification.
In a half-arsed form and with 1/100 the community of Perl doing anything with them. And still not all of them.
Personally I stopped caring somewhere around 2006. And I've read all of Larry's "apocalypses" back when they used to be on Oreillynet, as well as followed the internal implementation politics for a few years.
>By the way. Rust is still not complete. The wikipedia article says, work started in 2006- Which makes it 8 years and still incomplete.
No, it says that it started as a "part-time side project in 2006". That could be 2 weeks total spend in those years writing a list of desired features in a napkin and getting a hello world compiled for all I know.
I only care about the time since the project was publicly announced and the community started working on it.
If Rust had been hyped as much as Perl6 I'd call it vaporware too. It may yet turn out to be vaporware (in that it's not done), but right now I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that they will actually deliver on their promises.
I have Ruby and Perl tattoos and now work at a Python (2.7) shop, so I have all of the horses in this race, but is there a significant difference between a language that's vaporware[1] and one that nobody uses?
The previous things I've seen also indicated that Python 3 _isn't_ widely supported, though I guess Django finally got support recently, and that it _wasn't_ faster than 2.7. Is this just old information on my part, or is it different for certain kinds of workloads?
> it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu.
Yeah, that should have a large impact, for sure.
1: I have seen lots of "check out this Perl 6 code" blog posts, but I don't know to what degree it's ACTUALLY vaporware.
> but is there a significant difference between a language that's vaporware[1] and one that nobody uses?
There's a significant difference between a language for which a complete implementation does not exist such that you cannot use it, and one for which an implementation exists but few people currently choose to use it because there is a closely-related predecessor language that still has a stronger ecosystem.
As an stage in the development of a language out of an existing, widely-used predecessor, the "vaporware" stage tends to precede the "available but not popular due to predecessors ecosystem advantage" stage, which tends to precede the "displaces predecessor" stage.
Its obviously possible for a language to stop progressing at any of the earlier stages before reaching the last stage.
> People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the scales.
I doubt it will tip that much. The enterprise customers we develop for still ship on CentOS and have auditing departments that have to scour each library and package a system depends on. Adding a dependency hurts in this environment. These institutions only upgrade their interpreters once every 5 - 8 years if you're lucky.
Comparing Perl 6 with Python 3 is a big joke. Even a cursory look at the Perl 6 specification and implementations like rakudo will tell you Perl 6 is attempting to go to a place where Python may like likely go in the next 40 years, with 10 Python 3 like disasters.
Its an exceptionally ambitiously project which they are in no hurry in finishing. And that is for a good reason.
Its an exceptionally ambitiously project which they are in no hurry in finishing. And that is for a good reason.
Way back in the early days, the goal was to release a usable 6.0 in a couple of years. The "there's no hurry" line is a post hoc justification from around 2006 or so.
But has the goal of Perl 6 as a project remained static? I'm relatively new to the Perl community. I know you are around since a very long time.
But I think the goal has changed from "Let's fix Perl 5" to being a more bigger goal of developing a language what Perl 5 would likely look after say 3 decades of iterations. I can't say if that is good from a purely practical perspective. But it does sound like worthwhile goal to chase.
Lets take a look at Python 3 itself. Yes they finished the project, but 5 years after that- Now what? Users don't seem to a have a valid reason to move away from 2.x series for merely small time incremental improvements, while forced to migrate bulk of the infrastructure and code for nearly ~0% productivity gains.
Perl 6 could have come out by 2005-2006, and if it were to be merely a incremental non-backwards compatible change over p5. We would be having similar posts about p6 as we are having now about Python 3. Imagine a refined, yet not that beneficial p5 breaking CPAN. I am sure you wouldn't like such a situation.
I suspect but can't entirely prove that the appearance, rapid ascent, and even more rapid burnout of Pugs made a lot of people realize that this would be a long slog. Even so, if you look back at mailing list messages or conference talks or blog posts in 2006, 2007, 2008, whenever, you'll see that the party line has always been "It's only a year or two away."
People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the scales.