What happened to Perl 6? [LWN.net]

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 26, 2022 20:25 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

That was already covered a couple of years back

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 26, 2022 22:10 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (7 responses)

The people developing Perl 6 eventually decided it was too different from Perl 5 to be considered the next version and decided to rename it Raku instead. To avoid confusion, the people who continued to develop Perl 5 have decided to skip straight to Perl 7 if they ever want to increment the version number.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 26, 2022 23:34 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (5 responses)

> The people developing Perl 6 eventually decided it was too different from Perl 5 to be considered the next version and decided to rename it Raku instead.

Is it too cynic to think that in the entire Perl 6 train wreck that is one of the few sensible decisions?

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 27, 2022 1:29 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (4 responses)

Nope, I'm with you on that. It started with the best of intentions and went off the rails, as most good intentions do when bureaucracies dream them up.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 30, 2022 16:45 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (3 responses)

Perl 6/Raku wasn't invented by a bureaucracy, though; it was straight from the mind of Larry Wall. The big problem was second system effect. Perl had worked hard to maintain backward compatibility through Perl 5, which constrained Larry's ability to make big, incompatible changes. He threw that all out the window for the design of Perl 6/Raku, though, and just went wild with all the ideas he hadn't been able to follow through on for the previous 20 years. Some of those were good ideas- I think the extension of regexes to grammars and changing the way sigils work were long overdue- but many of them were just change for change's sake.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 31, 2022 23:07 UTC (Tue) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

Not to mention it's whole runtime and meta-object system is somewhat .... idealized.

It does mean perl6 is almost self-hosting, which is neat I guess.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted Jun 8, 2022 10:12 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

I have looked at a lot of features in Raku with a skeptical eye, but honestly, I still cannot point out anything that was clearly just done for change's sake. Not after understanding how those things actually fit together. Part of learning the language is having these moments of "oh, now that other thing makes sense". It's usually about consistency.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted Jun 13, 2022 21:35 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

There was brief loud pushback about “adding unnecessary complexity to the compiler” or whatever when − [U+2212] and friends (×÷) were added. But the little details like that make it so much nicer to use than, well, anything, that I rarely need to think twice about using `raku -e` for quick experiments. The only text-munging tool I use it can't reasonably replace is jq, and I can't use that without getting lost in its manpage for an hour…

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 27, 2022 6:09 UTC (Fri) by bof (subscriber, #110741) [Link]

Oh that's totally funny, in that it mirrors PHP history on the numbers - the difference being that PHP 6 from what I gather, never actually saw the light of day. Hilarious anyway.

What happened to Perl 6?

Posted May 28, 2022 3:14 UTC (Sat) by jahigd02 (guest, #158771) [Link]

Perl 6 became 'Raku' when it was decided that its changes were too different to warrant still calling it a 'Perl' version. Evidently, Perl 7 is going to be what 'Perl 6' would've been had it not been so radically different. Basically Perl5++.