(Replying to PARENT post)

C++ is getting the Perl treatment.

Perl had Ruby, Python, and PHP attacking it. C++ has Rust, Go, Nim, and Swift (albeit that only Rust is a direct challenge, the others are taking market share for things that used to be C++). I've even seen people using Vala in new places.

Perl was hard to use. The new languages addressed many of the ergonomics, semantics, and design concerns. Rust addresses a lot of C++'s dangerous baggage.

Perl had novel tooling at the time, but eventually wound up behind. Newer languages brought more to the table. Rust has Cargo.

Perl tried evolving for a long time. Eventually birthed a new language altogether (Raku), albeit that the old language still receives updates. (Python also saw this.) Google recently unveiled Carbon. Now there's Cppfront. The C++ language committee is doing different things...

It's a question of which ecosystem evolves faster and ultimately which ecosystem attracts more fresh blood as old timers age out. AFAICT, younger developers are flocking to Rust instead of C++. There are a bunch of Rustlang streams on Twitch.

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(Replying to PARENT post)

That's an interesting analogy that I hadn't seen before, simplified as Perl : Python :: C++ : Rust in terms of conjectural market adoption.

As someone who did a lot of Perl in web 1.0 times, and haven't really been a full time programmer in a long time but occasionally have since written Ruby, Python, and PHP, but never really felt those languages were that huge of improvements over Perl (certainly now their ecosystems are, but I'd love a much better entrant to successfully "attack" Python), and would sometimes wonder what if Perl had just managed to evolve significantly instead...makes me appreciate and even root for efforts to "make C++ 10x simpler, safer, and more toolable" like this one or perhaps Carbon, even though Rust does seem like a huge improvement.

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(Replying to PARENT post)

Perl lost popularity when people were using windows, learnt programming with java, were scared by unix idioms, implicity, regexps, contexts and concepts like anonymous blocks you can map/filter with. nowadays everyone finally think those features are cool (maybe even C23 will have lambdas) so perl wouldn't have lost popularity. I'm still waiting for 1 other interpreted language to have something as convenient as the CPAN ecosystem.

However I see one similarity between C++ and Perl: for decades, they evolved a lot from there ecosystems and nowadays, both C++ and Perl could be difficult to learn just because you can't figure out what module to use to get the job done. Also Perl suffers the lisp curse http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html (I don't know about C++).

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(Replying to PARENT post)

Actually I think the PL/I treatment is closer as example.

The language complexity was famous and eventually grew into several subsets before UNIX adoption wiping out most systems languages that sprung as PL/I alternatives.

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