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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6. The same is also true of Python2/Python3, which is why that transition has also taken so long. The difference is they managed to do it without everyone abandoning Python2 for something else.

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It’s pretty easy to upgrade most code from python 2 to 3 and a lot of code just runs as is. The reason the upgrade path was so slow, imo, is that even a reasonably small amount of work is still work, and for a lot of people, the benefits didn’t justify spending any time at all rewriting software that already worked.

After the initial round of "useful PyPI packages don't support Python 3 though, I can't migrate", that "I know 3.x is different and I'll have to read up on the differences....later" was absolutely the biggest blocker for adoption imo.

I know proficient Python programmers who were starting projects from scratch in 2017 and didn't want to use Python 3.x because they were in a hurry, worried that they didn't know how to write Python 3.x in a timely manner because they hadn't invested the time to learn it. Lots and lots of people just knew it was a known unknown for them, had no idea of the magnitude of the effort required to switch (tiny for new projects! tiiiny) and just put "look into this" somewhere deep on their backlog.

Apart from specific cases, which all have workarounds, you can run the same source in python 2 and 3. Many projects still do and handle the edge cases with libraries like "six". Even that transition/difference is much smaller than the perl5/6 issue.

The other difference is that they did not split into a python 2 and python 3 dev team over the period of two decades which then both decided to keep officially developing their respective languages.

> It's a different language because you can't run Perl5 programs unmodified in Perl6.

I vaguely remember that, when Perl 6 was first announced, the idea was that it would be able to run unmodified Perl 5 programs (and not only that, but it would also be able to mix Perl 5 and Perl 6 modules in the same program).

The key word there being "was".

Note that you can mix the languages in the same program, but it's no different than the capability of such modules as Inline::C and Inline::Python in Perl, and doesn't actually involve natively implementing a Perl interpreter.

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