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Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6.Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6.Posted Feb 11, 2013 19:12 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)In reply to: Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. by niner Parent article: Chromatic: Goodnight, Parrot
And I really, really can't understand, how people (and on lwn.net most oft all) still think that removing people from project X means more people on the "more important" project Y in free software. It doesn't. Period. OK, point taken. However, I think the Perl 6 debacle (and believe me, from outside the Perl community it really does look like a debacle) has hurt the Perl brand. So even if it hasn't hurt Perl technically, it's definitely hurt the perceptions of Perl. I own a company whose products are largely written in Perl 5. I've given up trying to find good programmers with Perl experience; instead, I just look for good programmers and get them to learn Perl. The shrinking appeal of Perl is eventually going to start hurting us.
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Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:07 UTC (Mon) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]
> However, I think the Perl 6 debacle (and believe me, from outside the Perl community it really does look like a debacle) has hurt the Perl brand.
Right. It is emphatically *not* a debacle, but it sure has been made to look like one and that hurts the brand.
> So even if it hasn't hurt Perl technically, it's definitely hurt the perceptions of Perl.
Look how you're framing things. Hasn't hurt Perl technically?!? Why are you discounting the huge positive impact of things like Moose or the testing revolution?
> I own a company whose products are largely written in Perl 5. I've given up trying to find good programmers with Perl experience; instead, I just look for good programmers and get them to learn Perl. The shrinking appeal of Perl is eventually going to start hurting us.
That's why Perl 6 was started by folk who wanted something that *was* appealing. And, even though most folk currently think otherwise (invariably based on ignorance, not knowledge), the Perl 6 language *is* appealing to Perl's original audiences and several new ones too.
Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:40 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Why are you discounting the huge positive impact of things like Moose... Moose, IMO, is a giant negative impact. It hugely increases the memory footprint of Perl. Our product cannot possibly use Moose because of this. And it has caused CPANhell... some modules want Moose and others still don't, so you end up with Moose and with traditional blessed-hash object models. And it also means we can use fewer CPAN modules because anything that drags in Moose is no good. The Perl developers even recognized this which is why we have Moose, Mouse, Moo and Mo. And even the joke-class M. As a Perl developer, I look at all this crap and run away screaming. It's a total mess. ... the testing revolution It seems to me that testing was always a strength of Perl since way before Perl 6, so I don't understand what you mean by this supposed benefit of Perl 6. the Perl 6 language *is* appealing to Perl's original audiences It's not that appealing to me. And although the Perl 6 language may be cool, the implementation (or should that be "implementations"? Why do something once if you can do it twice?) suck.
Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. Posted Feb 11, 2013 23:16 UTC (Mon) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]
> Moose, IMO, is a giant negative impact. It hugely increases the memory footprint of Perl. Our product cannot possibly use Moose because of this. And it has caused CPANhell ... Moose, Mouse, Moo and Mo.
OK. Notice that the problems you see with it are all due to limitations in the Perl 5 toolchain, p5p process, and Perl 5 CPAN culture. Perl 6 can't fix that. In the meantime, many Perl 5 folk have expressed thanks for Moose and other technologies derived from the Perl 6 project.
> It seems to me that testing was always a strength of Perl since way before Perl 6, so I don't understand what you mean by this supposed benefit of Perl 6.
Perl was pro-testing in the 90s but the Perl 6 project focus on it was a big part in the transformation of the Perl community take on testing to another level in the 2000s.
> Perl 6 is not that appealing to me.
Perhaps not for you. But, imo, for all the current anti-Perl5 and anti-Perl6 sentiment, over the next few years a lot of existing and potential Perl users will take to Perl 6 in much the way past users took to Perl 5.
> And although the Perl 6 language may be cool, the implementation (or should that be "implementations"? Why do something once if you can do it twice?) suck.
I see a very high quality implementation reaching maturity, with the one remaining major weakness -- the Parrot backend -- being sorted out this year. What about it sucks that isn't due to Parrot?
You can't stop folk spending their time doing what they want to do. There's a specification that anyone can see and several folk wanted to write a Perl 6 compiler so several were written. (That said, Rakudo is clearly the leader.) Volunteer time isn't fungible so what's the problem?
Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. Posted Feb 12, 2013 2:22 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] If developers want to work on Perl 6, good luck to them. However, the Perl 6 project has (IMO) severely damaged the Perl brand. If Perl 6 had been called "Rakudo" or "SpongeBob" or any other name that had no connection to "Perl", that would have been fine because it wouldn't have damaged Perl's reputation.
Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6. Posted Feb 12, 2013 2:32 UTC (Tue) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link]
> If Perl 6 had been called "Rakudo" or "SpongeBob" or any other name that had no connection to "Perl", that would have been fine because it wouldn't have damaged Perl's reputation.
As someone who rarely uses Perl, I have to say that I haven't heard anything about Perl 6 since its early days (ten years ago now, apparently). Then there wasn't a usable implementation by the time the hype had died down, and people went back to saying "Perl" as a synonym for "Perl 5".
So I'm not convinced there's been any damage to Perl's reputation because of the version 6 situation. Perl's reputation has perhaps dwindled because other languages can do a lot of the "glue" stuff without as much room for pathological syntax.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 12, 2013 4:54 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Somewhat relevant: I've been keeping an eye on a discussion on the perl5 list wherein some developers, at least, are feeling frustrated. Seems they would like to move beyond the "perl 5" name which, they say, adds to the impression that the language has stagnated. But what to move to? It seems somebody else has already grabbed "perl 6". So they feel stuck, and not everybody is happy about it.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 12, 2013 11:52 UTC (Tue) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]
Renaming perl 5 to perl 7 sounds like it might increase sales of popcorn worldwide.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 12, 2013 12:57 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Heck, that stunt would probably make America's corn lobby shut up about ethanol.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 12, 2013 16:04 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I think a far more entertaining choice would be to call it Perl 6 and register a domain like "perl-6.org" :)
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 12, 2013 16:20 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] This has happened with other products. For example, after one company acquired some rights to the proprietary microcomputer operating system RISC OS and bumped the version from 3.x to 4, a few years later another company acquired some other rights to the original code and released their version as RISC OS 5, even though it was mostly version 3.something with hardware compatibility revisions (incorporating some code that may have originated from Linux as a "Hardware Compatibility Layer" in a way that prompted allegations of GPL violation). There was no love lost between those organisations. What concerns me with these big re-workings of existing projects and the "inheritance" of those projects' names in favour of the "next big thing" is that apart from the confusion that a lack of backwards-compatibility might bring to each of the brands in general, they also send the signal to anyone who doesn't embrace the next big thing - those who continue developing the existing versions - that they no longer have the right to use such names. After all, those people will just "run out" of versions unless they rename their project or play leapfrog. But I suppose that if someone has already pushed in front of you and tabled a claim to the next major version number, playing leapfrog is just payback.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 13, 2013 1:36 UTC (Wed) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]
> if someone has already pushed in front of you and tabled a claim to the next major version number, playing leapfrog is just payback.
The "someone" is Larry Wall, who made the name "Perl" up, has spent 25 years volunteering most of his spare time, and frequently a lot more than that, to developing Perl, and has always been clear that he's not relinquishing his BDFL role in relation to the brandname "Perl" and is not interested in renaming Perl 6.
Imo it would be good if Perl 5 were renamed Perl 7 and then Perl 6 and Perl 5 merged back together with them becoming fully reintegrated at around Perl 11. But Larry sees things differently and I respect his view and his BDFL status.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 14, 2013 12:49 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Well, part of what I am trying to communicate is that the right to use a name is not always seen in the same way by everyone involved. I don't doubt Larry Wall's commitment to Perl, and he can make a dialect of COBOL and call it Perl for all I care, but when other people feel that they too have a stake in the brand, they get rather upset if things start to change under their feet. One sees this even with brands like Coke where disgruntled customers with no involvement in the making of the product get upset at changes in the form of the product.
To summarise, someone can be completely entitled to control a brand but they have to live with the consequences of their decisions. We've seen this with KDE and GNOME, of course, but also with Python and Zope. The interesting thing about Zope is that the project's output was actually renamed from Zope 3 to BlueBream precisely because the people with the right to use the name felt that continuing to do so was confusing to people.
Effect on Perl 5 Posted Feb 14, 2013 18:55 UTC (Thu) by raiph (guest, #89283) [Link]
> Well, part of what I am trying to communicate is that the right to use a name is not always seen in the same way by everyone involved.
I hear what you are saying (and totally agree).
> I don't doubt Larry Wall's commitment to Perl, and he can make a dialect of COBOL and call it Perl for all I care
He wouldn't do that because he is very committed to Perl. Perl 6 is very clearly Perl, not COBOL.
> but when ... people feel that they too have a stake in the brand, they get rather upset if things start to change under their feet.
Think about that with Larry and sixers where the ... appears. They have put 12 years in to producing a worthy new Perl. Rather than help get it production ready most folk are happier to complain about the name.
Now think about it with "others" as you originally wrote where the ... appears. What has changed under their feet and who changed it?
> To summarise, someone can be completely entitled to control a brand but they have to live with the consequences of their decisions.
Right. I think Larry understands that Perl 6 solves pretty much all the problems with Perl 5 while retaining its essence and he's not going to let pent up frustration with how long its taken and its changes in syntax derail the efforts of the last 12 years.
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