Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Posted Oct 20, 2019 17:31 UTC (Sun) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
In reply to: Perl 6 renamed to Raku by sorpigal
Parent article: Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Evaluating Perl 6 "by its merits" resulted in me coming to the conclusion that it's not suitable to replace Perl 5 and won't ever be.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Posted Oct 20, 2019 23:29 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Perl 5 is basically a legacy, kinda like Fortran or AWK. It does what it needs to do, but almost no new significantly-sized code is written in them. So they don't need replacement, they're fine as is.

Replacing Perl 5 would have required recreation of all of the Perl 5's quirks, and nobody really wants that.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Posted Oct 22, 2019 14:27 UTC (Tue) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link] (1 responses)

I was referring to "looking at the language and its implementation in order to determine if I would want to use it instead of Perl 5 for new developments". There are plenty of areas where Perl 5 would warrant improvement, eg, multithreading or exception handling, but a replacement would still need to have an implementation which at least provides all the benefits the Perl 5 implementation does. This would mean fully automated and extensible resource release management and full support for closures.

Perl 6 renamed to Raku

Posted Oct 23, 2019 20:42 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> This would mean fully automated and extensible resource release management and full support for closures.
Uhh... Perl 5 doesn't really have fully automated resource release management?

Perl 6 of course has closures.