Comment by stouset
3 days ago
I agree it was a combination of Raku and Ruby. As far as I'm concerned, Ruby deprecates Perl 5. It fills the same niche while avoiding a lot of the absolutely crazier parts of Perl (no shade; Perl was designed in a far different time and place). If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl. I have fond memories of the language, it was the first one I wrote professionally, but never again.
Raku being in such an indeterminate state for so long was an eternity for it to lose mindshare to Ruby.
> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl.
I don't think I ever thought about it but I think I have implicitly taken this to heart since I last was using Perl seriously. Almost every engineering org I've worked for in the last decade has had Ruby as a part of its stack for e.g. scripting or lambdas and it's what I reach for when I need to script something. And I've done Rails work in a few orgs too, which has few parallels in its niche even without considering Perl.
Although I suspect for most people Python is where they land if we're just talking about scripting or hacking something together...or anything (I hate it but it is what it is lol).
> If you know Ruby, there is essentially zero reason to learn Perl
When I still used Perl (10y ago) Ruby was notably slower on many tasks. Ruby probably the slowest among popular script languages.
Bordering on zero percent of projects too performance sensitive to be written in Ruby should be written in Perl instead.