Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

I think the name Camelia or Raku is fine, no need to argue over it forever. During this renaissance period of computer languages in history, it will be nice to get this out and iterate. Given there are plethora of choices today like go, rust, Nim, elm, elixir, Scala, julia, crystal, F#, D etc. trying for developer mindshare which is a limited resource speed is of essence.

Indeed with parrot VM besides perl 6 developers can be truly polyglot with same toolchain. So move forward, it's still a great addition. I feel parrot is truly open source, better than Graal no Oracle involvement.

I wish Perl 5 was being renamed. As a language, it's annoying, but as a tool, it's possibly the best programmable tool ever made.

Perl 6 should definitely be renamed so that Perl 5 can just be Perl.

An easy way to see this is to simply look at the mascot for each language.

Perl_5 => Humphrey the Camel (See https://www.perl.org/) (I am not sure if the camel actually has a name, so Humphrey seems like a good name for a camel mascot.)

Perl_6 => Camelia the Butterfly (See https://perl6.org/)

They are very different and the languages are too, so why should the languages both be called "Perl X" ?

I haven't looked at Perl in years, having long ago switched to Python/SciPy, but now I see that Perl 6 doesn't have GIL, something that Python has been unable to shed. So now a language that nobody cares about anymore solves the #1 problem that I have with Python. We are truly blessed to have so many shitty implementations of dumb programming languages to choose from these days!

As an outsider who hasn't written perl code in more than a decade this all makes a lot of sense to me.

I think of Perl 5 as something "outdated" because I know that there is a language called Perl 6. When I think of Perl 6 I am not particularly interested in it because I assume it's more or less the same as the "old" Perl, which I don't use and didn't really like back in the day.

Renaming Perl 6 to something else would help with both of these problems.

That said, I wonder how much damage has already been done at this point and whether renaming it now will still be very useful. There are a lot of references to Perl 6 out there already, so convincing people that Perl 5 is the latest version of Perl again will be tough.