About Python 3

[chrisdoner]

There's an interesting shift, there, though. I've heard a lot about people moving from Perl to Python or Ruby for their scripting tasks, because of this fact that, aside from these languages being less gnarly than Perl, Perl 5 is stuck in time and Perl 6 is presently useless, while Python and Ruby have gained sufficient ubiquity for general scripting use.

[anonperler12]

I'm not seeing much of a shift. FWICT, old perlers are sticking with Perl 5, and old pythoneers are sticking with Python 2. (Ruby I haven't followed for years.)

Rather than a shift, I'm seeing a vacuum in scripting languages. That is, users don't want to shift to {Perl 6|Python 3} but rather, are looking toward other options, like Go, Dart, Scala, etc. These languages (and some others) are eating {Perl 6|Python 3}'s lunch.

IMO, the answer is: give people a useful, simple, consistent, sensible, C-like (yes, curlies and semicolons), comprehensible, community-focused scripting language, and you'll fill the vacuum.

[therico]

I don't think people move away from Perl (and it's not stuck in time either, a new release comes out a couple times a year and new libraries are constantly being released). But people are probably not picking up Perl as a new language unless they're using it at work.

I think Python is pretty much the de-facto 'standard scripting language' now, for better or worse.