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Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#91

Post by joosters »

0xffff2 wrote: post #78
mkozlows wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... which is the whole point of renaming it, right? "Oh, it took too long to update Perl and now Perl is dead" is true. "Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features, and excels at this particular type of problem" can also be true. But nobody can hear this message while they keep thinking about Perl.

I doubt it. "Raku is an interesting new language with some neat features..." will be met with "Oh, you mean Perl 6? lol." If Perl is dead, renaming the last version isn't going to change anything.

Perl isn't dead. It's a perfectly good, stable language with excellent library support. It's just not sexy and new, so there's no buzz about it.

Perl6, on the other hand, is effectively another language altogether, and I hope they rename it completely to stop the confusion.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#92

Post by empath75 »

pjc50 wrote: post #40
cutler wrote: post #12

I don't get all this "Perl 6 is a different language" nonsense. It was created by Larry Wall and retains all the characteristics of Perl 5 whilst adding a lot of great stuff from other languages. Sadly, performance prevents it being taken seriously in production.

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.

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.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#93

Post by sswezey »

goto11 wrote: post #58
DangerousPie wrote: post #29

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 I think of Perl 5 as something "outdated" because I know that there is a language called Perl 6.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 wou…

If Perl 6 is renamed, Perl 5 could skip to Perl 7 in the next version to avoid confusion.

From what I gathered, I believe that Perl 5 would transition to the minor version number much like how Java did (1.7 -> 7).

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#94

Post by claudiawerner »

mmaunder wrote: post #53

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time. Perl6 was promised.…

This seems like an ignorant mindset. Not only is P6 not a "single version update" (which shows ignorance about what the language actually is) but it has features to rival any dynamically typed language today and supersedes many of them. If you don't care to "hear these discussions about the minutia related to it", what was the point in your comment other than to say you're not personally interested in it? But it's hard to gauge if you actually are interested in it since you have "blocked it from [your] psyche" so you couldn't possibly know if it's any good.

It is probably more reasonable to block a comment which appears to have nothing of value (except in proclaiming its own ignorance) from our collective psyches.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#95

Post by claudiawerner »

mkozlows wrote: post #81
dragontamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they're different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they're called "javac" and "jvm." Bad example: Java actually has many VMs available for it: Oracle, OpenJDK, Zing, and IBM come to mind. (EDIT: And "Dalvik", for all the Android fans). I'm unsure if Java has multiple compilers, but its quite possible. Python has CPython 2.0, CPython 3.0, and Jython at leas…

Sure, but most people don't know or care. They just type "python" and Python happens. If they need to find another implementation, it's possible, but there's no question about what the default implementation is.

Assuming you've installed "Perl 6" (well, Rakudo) you can just type "perl6" and Perl 6 happens.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#96

Post by wombatpm »

I learned Perl4 in grad school and it was a life changing tool to automate my analysis workflow. With it I was able to script complex solutions that drove stepper drivers and CCD cameras on a microscope for data and image collection.

I stayed through the Perl5 change over and thought it was good. Then I tried OO programming. And cried. And read that Perl 6 would make it better. But I needed something now, on a windows box, and free. That was 2003.

I tried Python and loved it.

Higher Order Perl made me appreciate what Perl could do, but the state of Perl 6 and lack of progress kept me away, as the features I most wanted were always fixes coming real soon now.

I STILL program python. Perl had me and lost me. Perl might not be dead, but it is dead to me.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#97

Post by buu700 »

goto11 wrote: post #58
DangerousPie wrote: post #29

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 wou…

If Perl 6 is renamed, Perl 5 could skip to Perl 7 in the next version to avoid confusion.

That feels like the best way to save the brand. Cut a Perl 7 release concurrently with the Raku v1 release, and just get on a regular schedule of incrementing the version every 6 or 12 months.

Edit: Okay, starting from the minor version instead of 7 sounds like an even better approach.

Not exactly the same situation, but this reminds me of Angular. Angular 2 was a marketing debacle; the official stance of "Angular != AngularJS" is stubborn and nonsensical — any idiot can see that they're confusingly similar, and if they're supposed to be different then why is the first Angular release version 2.0.0 instead of 1.0.0? (I personally think they should've called it Circular.)

In any case, I think the way they moved forward (with "Angular 2" no longer being a thing, except in reference to that specific release) was ultimately the best way to salvage the situation; given its recovery and growth since then I'd say Perl could take some lessons from it.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#98

Post by jandrese »

DonHopkins wrote: post #66
coldpie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-perl programmer, the mnemonic descriptions in the perlvar manpage crack me up. They probably are useful and make sense to perl programmers, but from the outside, they look like parody.

The whole "Perl is easy to learn because it borrows from other languages" argument is based on a very specific set of historical assumptions about which "other languages" everybody knows, and what associations they have with each punctuation character from different shells and languages and utilities and operating systems and config files circa 1987, that is just totally obsolete these days.

Bash still uses the same variable names. Are you saying nobody writes shell scripts anymore?

Plus, you can always "use English;" if you want less cryptic names.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#99

Post by Grinnz »

mmaunder wrote: post #53

I'm sorry but Perl 6 isnt relevant IMO. It took too long. I was a Perl developer at etoys.com in 2000 and BBC in 2001. I wrote OneMusic for Radio1 and even convinced the BBCs uptight ops team to run it with modperl so it could handle the high traffic it did. I also created the job search engine WorkZoo in modperl, one of Time Magazines top 50 sites of 2005 and Indeed's main competitor at the time. Perl6 was promised.…

The entire point is to align the name with the reality so that people don't make the exact mistake you made here of thinking that it's a "version update" for Perl.

Re: Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

#100

Post by Grinnz »

mkozlows wrote: post #51
roryrjb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good reason is that?

Off the top of my head: 1. CPAN was great 20 years ago, but it's a joke compared to modern dependency management systems. 2. Functions don't have explicit parameters, and still shift off of @_. (This can be kind of a catch-all for all the "things that are useful for scripts, but suck for programming in the large" design decisions in Perl 5, because I honestly don't remember all of them at this point.)

1. Carton 2. Function::Parameters, experimental core signatures
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