Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeade | Hacker News Reader

This sounds exactly like a Larry Wall solution, especially the "use interchangeably" and "pick the one that works the best for you" parts.

View on HN

I like Larry Wall solutions. Why just throw away a perfectly working implementation when people are still using it and maintainers are still motivated to work on it? Why not do a new spec which improves on the old one and if it's succesful people will switch anyway. It allows the language to evolve while it also doesn't force users into the new thing against their will. None of that "Python 2.7 is going to be EOL in 1/1/2020".

> I like Larry Wall solutions.

Me too, historically anyway, but I'm not a fan of this half-way approach. Someone explicitly requested that Larry create an alias for the language [0].

> If another name is truly as superior as the full-rename proponents claim it would be, I believe the alias can become a defacto name through its sheer amount of use. Thus, the creation of the alias can be seen as a means for the full-rename proponents to prove their claims.

Emphasis mine. Among other things, this does not compute for me. Adopting three names for the language (Raku, Raku Perl 6, Perl 6) is the exact opposite of what the full-rename proponents are suggesting. You're not giving them an opportunity to prove their claims, you're giving them the middle finger. Or that's how it seems to me, anyway.

[0] https://rakudo.party/post/A-Request-to-Larry-Wall-to-Create-...

Perl 6 is still Perl and the name was in use for quite some time, so an alias makes better sense rather than a full rename. Full renames are annoying. Just look at ECMAScript. Is anyone using this name? No, everybody's still using JavaScript. People are only using ES5/6/7 when they refer to the specification. The name stuck. It's too late now. And people are needlessly wasting too much energy over a name.

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” -- Phil Karlton

The difference is that Javascript is outrageously popular, while Perl 6 is confined to an audience of a handful of nerds (me included). I think this is a great time to just switch names, as the number of people affected is tiny.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.

"There's more than one way to name it"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com