Re: Perl 7 or Perl 2013?

On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Ricardo Signes wrote:

> Furthermore, were Perl 7 to be released (secretly known to be Perl 5.20.0),
> what would the outcome be?  It would gain attention, and people would say,

I think the bigger problem is that by not allowing a Perl 7 (or 2013 or 
42), there's no way to offer a new Perl that's an evolution of Perl 5. 
It's Perl 5 the backwards compatible forever language or Perl 6 the 
revolution (which is coming soon?). So if someone had a serious proposal 
for a non backwards-compatible evolution of Perl 5 (like, say, Moe) 
they're completely shut out of the Perl name.

Maybe the name just doesn't matter that much. If something like Moe is 
good enough, we'll all move to the moe-porters list and be done with it.

But still, it's hard not to be frustrated when it feels like people with a 
significant interest in the future of Perl 5-like languages are told that 
all future version numbers belong to a project that has significantly 
fewer users, developers, and mindshare than the existing Perl 5 language 
(and community).

I'm 100% okay with how long Perl 6 has taken, and this shouldn't be taken 
as a criticism of that project. I think it's an interesting project, and 
it's spurred a lot of good Perl 5 development. Maybe ten years from now 
I'll be programming in Perl 6 on a day to day basis. But Larry's 
insistence on squatting the Perl 5+X (for X >= 1) names is more and more 
starting to seem like a rejection of reality, and is less justified the 
longer Perl 6 takes, and the less involved he is with Perl 5.


-dave

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