Excellent point in the last paragraph. Python, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, and C# all have/had business models and business advocates in a way that Perl never did.
Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Python and JavaScript were picked up by Google, but later. Amazon was originally built out of Perl. Perl never converted its industry footprint into that kind of advocacy, I think some of that is also culture-driven.
Maybe until the 2001 O'Reilly layoffs. Tim hired Larry for about 5 years, but that was mostly working on the third edition of the Camel. A handful of other Perl luminaries worked there at the same time (Jon Orwant, Nat Torkington).
When I joined in 2002, there were only a couple of developers in general, and no one sponsored to work on or evangelize any specific technology full time. Sometimes I wonder if Sun had more paid people working on Tcl.
I don't mean to malign or sideline the work anyone at ORA or ActiveState did in those days. Certainly the latter did more work to make Perl a first-class language on Windows than anyone. Yet that's very different from a funded Python Software Foundation or Sun supporting Java or the entire web browser industry funding JavaScript or....
colinstrickland|2 months ago
chromatic|2 months ago
When I joined in 2002, there were only a couple of developers in general, and no one sponsored to work on or evangelize any specific technology full time. Sometimes I wonder if Sun had more paid people working on Tcl.
I don't mean to malign or sideline the work anyone at ORA or ActiveState did in those days. Certainly the latter did more work to make Perl a first-class language on Windows than anyone. Yet that's very different from a funded Python Software Foundation or Sun supporting Java or the entire web browser industry funding JavaScript or....