I used perl when dinosaurs still roamed the land. Can somebody explain why it took so long for Perl 6? I read first p6/parrot vm textbook as a schoolboy more than a decade ago.
Honestly? Because Perl 5 was ‘good enough’ and widely installed, and then critical mass moved on to python and JavaScript (which both then developed their own version skew issues).
I never walked away. I was banned with trumped-up charges.
Their former pastime was that my criticism had no technical merits, they now changed course and claim that my criticism is uncivilized. Well, this is a good strategy to hold the community together. Create a common enemy. Get him fired. Collect the angry mob and give them powers.
More of a self-flagellation than an apology, frankly… it was actively uncomfortable to read, unlike even his initial angry mail. I have yet to respond to him because I didn’t know what to say after that.
You have to ask them. They are the ones refusing any changes and cooperation, and are still actively destructive. In parrot the destructive people eventually burned out, and I could fix much stuff, but the big changes from around 2.7, the calling convention and the jit and runloop removal was eventually too much.
It took a while to design the language, which went through significant changes in both semantics and implementation (Parrot was abandoned for MoarVM, until recently, the main banch of the repository still was called 'nom' for 'new object model', there was a Great List Refactor, ...)
The language was finally deemed sufficiently stable in 2015 to have its first proper release (the 'Christmas' version 6.c). We're still waiting for an implementation with adequate performance for generic usage. The problem is that a lot of the implementation happens at a high level, which necessitates a sufficiently smart optimizer.
