http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=11105180

"Is Perl 6 being renamed?" at blogs.perl.org by ovid

Update: others have quoted what they feel to be the most salient point of ovid's article, so here's mine:

So yeah, there's bitterness and the Perl community not only needs to heal, but we need to find a way forward for both languages. The suggestion to change the name of Perl 6 to "raku" is effectively designed to make this happen. Perl 5 can figure out how to get beyond the branding issue that's been plaguing it and Perl 6 can do the same thing.


The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6"
by footpad (Abbot) on Aug 28, 2019 at 20:10 UTC

    Parenthetically, one paragraph stands out to me:

    What follows isn't about facts. It's about opinions. If someone feels that X is awesome, it doesn't matter if you disagree. That's still their opinion. Further, you can try to change their mind, but be aware that when someone strongly disagrees with you, you usually want to start discussion from the points you can agree on and then slowly move to the points on which you disagree. However, that's not been the story of Perl 5/6. People disagree and immediately jump to disagreements rather than trying to find common ground.

    Recall that Ovid is one of the most senior members of the site, even though he is no longer as active as he once was. (As of this writing, he logged in yesterday, so it's clear he's lurking at the very least.)

    This ideal of acceptance is one of the foundations that helped the site survive as long as it has.

    There are many differing views in currently-active threads. A few gentle and constructive; others...less so.

    Ultimately, we're here to learn and advocate Perl...and in the spirit of TIMTOWTDI, let's let individual monks figure out what that means for themselves. OK?

    Speaking for myself, it's more fun/productive to learn, rather than watch people fight/snark.

    That's my take; YMMV.

    --f

[reply]
Re: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6"
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Aug 28, 2019 at 20:38 UTC
    What's worse is that Perl 6 is often tainted by the name "Perl". Routinely I see in numerous online discussions that people refuse to even consider Perl 6 because they hate Perl.

    Perfect pull quote.

[reply]
      Routinely I see in numerous online discussions...

      Wait -- Routinely? Or objectively? (Or functionally?) 

      $orry - not $orry

      [download]
      I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.
[reply]
[d/l]
        "Routinely" as in "on a regular basis". Consistently, but not often enough to rate as "frequently".
[reply]
      > Routinely I see in numerous online discussions that people refuse to even consider ... because they hate Perl.

      which is actually a reason why (a successor to) Perl 5 needs to be rebranded.

      ( Like many Germans did after the WWs, compare "Alsatian" Shepherds or "Swedish" Trump ;-)

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

[reply]
[reply]
Re: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6"
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 29, 2019 at 16:07 UTC
    Perl 6 is going to easily oustrip Perl 5 in terms of performance.

    Is it? Easily?

[reply]
      Jonathan has shown some benchmarks of his optimization in his last yapc talks.

      You might wanna check out the videos.

      I can't tell much about the practicability of his work though.

      Side note

      I'm personally convinced that Perl 6 will only have a chance to survive if Perl 5 opcode can be somehow translated to it's VM primitives, hence bridging the gap.

      Those optimisations should than benefit P5 too.

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

[reply]

        I remember having this argument in 2011. So I'm not convinced about the inevitability of performance improvements and I'm definitely not convinced about the ease of these improvements.

[reply]

Back to Perl News