No matter what you do, at least one person will be unhappy about it.

> I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use.

"We've never heard of that happening, so no."

What does "dead" mean?

I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.

Can you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?

Sometimes and I have done so. However they have plenty of work for me. Unless there is a new feature we need time doesn't exist.

> It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.

Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.

Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10 years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before giving up on it again. Might be time to take another look.

There is a Perl 5 compatibility mode: it's called Inline::Perl5.

Maybe not the one that was originally planned. But that was only a real possibility if Perl 5 would be able to get rid of its XS addiction.

Ask yourself: how many of the up river Perl modules are Perl only?

The reference to "Programming Perl" was no doubt helped along by Perl developer Jesse Sheidlower who worked at the OED in the early 2000s. From his Wikipedia page: "Although not a computer programmer by training, Sheidlower introduced Perl to the North American offices of Oxford University Press and developed tools for data manipulation when no programmers were available. He is also one of the core developers of Catalyst, a popular Perl web development framework."

> I use almost none of its more esoteric features

Which features do you see as esoteric?

To me, it means features which would not be obvious to me in their function coming from a PHP/C/VB/Java background.

I typically write code which I can (and do) copy and paste into PHP almost without changes. (I use PHP as both webserver glue and for duplicating functionality so that I can have two copies of the same code to validate against each other.)

I've also started adding some Python to my project and developed a very similar style in Python, using commented curly braces to reduce the code's brittleness.

What makes ugrep better for your use cases?

Here's another site of mine y'all may be interested in: https://altbox.dev/

It's a collection of improved shell tools, organized by the tool they supplement.

As with this feature comparison chart, patches and suggestions are welcome: https://github.com/petdance/altbox

You should submit that to HN!