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Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding
by xorcist 12y ago
Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future.
I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) The situation is quite different from Python 3, which is the newest incarnation of the Python language.
- rat87 12y agoFrom what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.
- cbd1984 12y agoThe original plan, as I recall, was to move everyone to the Parrot VM, such that there would be a Perl 5 compiler, a Perl 6 compiler, a your-language-here compiler, and everyone would be able to share code in an environment that was similar to the JVM but friendlier to dynamic languages. So Perl 5 was never going to go away like Perl 4 had, it was just going to become one element of a broader ecosystem.