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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

These guys are using mostly Perl 5 though. They basically forked 5 years ago and call it Perl 11. They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11 comes from 5+6=11). AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku and drop the link to 6 and let Perl 5 continue as it was with new development instead of Perl becoming a completely new language.

Anyway it's complicated and I only follow along sporadically but as someone who used Perl 5 for over a decade when it was more popular I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language with only a tangential relationship to Perl 5.

I don't dislike Perl 6, I just remain biased towards 5 due to past experience.

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> They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers

This is outright untrue, the raku devs can't stand them any more than the rest of the perl community can.

> AFAIK they are working with them to get Perl 6 to use the name Raku

Will and Reini have contributed absolutely nothing to this effort except to periodically distract the people doing the actual work while we go clean up after their bullshit and drama.

> I welcome some kind of resolution where Perl 5 is just Perl and what is now Perl 6 becomes a new, different language

The raku change is indeed an excellent thing. However this giant pile of idiocy is trying to capitalise on that change to push their hostile fork of perl, and that's, uh, let's say "not such an excellent thing."

Hey thanks for correcting me. I was unaware of a lot of what's going on behind the scenes. As mentioned I was a heavy user of Perl 5 for a long time and I'll still find any excuse to use it given a problem I think it will be good at solving.

I'll have to read up on all of this before I say more but I do appreciate you giving me something to follow up on and learn about before I open my big mouth again!

's all cool, dude, countering their spin while minimally signal boosting it is why I'm commenting in this thread.

Have a skim through chromatic's Modern Perl when you're bored and see if it gives you ideas :)

I actually have read parts of it. My work stopped subscribing to O'Reilly's Safari Online Library so I lost access to it, kind of forgot about it but thanks for the reminder, I might just grab a copy today.

And thanks for the kind reply, there's nothing I hate more than speaking incorrectly or out of turn on HN!

Buy here or read online for free. This is the official website of the book: http://modernperlbooks.com/ (hint - it's worth buying :)

> They have a good relationship with Perl 6 devs/maintainers

This is untrue.

> and even incorporate some of 6 in their work (that's where 11 comes from 5+6=11)

None of this EVER materialized.

Let it be noted that I have defended Will Braswell publicly and privately many times in the past, most recently in https://liztormato.wordpress.com/2019/07/13/on-crime-and-pun...

But since the stunts he has pulled after the rename of Perl 6 to Raku became official (both public as well as in private messages), I have decided he has migrated to the plonk category of people in my life (the sound of garbage hitting the bottom of the bin).

Braswell's main push is his project RPerl which is a low-magic Perl5 subset compiled, with its best performance achieved by writing sections of your application in C++.

Urban's CPerl actually in many cases speeds up stock Perl5 code when there is no magic and falls back to comparable speeds to mainline when there's Perl magic involved.

Neither of these projects is part of mainline Perl. They are both forked and little has made it back to mainline largely because they have different goals but also due to personal conflicts these two have with large swathes of the community.

Both are very competent developers. That's not the problem with them trying to speak for the community they have rejected.

I think that's part of this push, that Perl 6 is gonna become Raku, so that Perl 5 is just Perl again. Then I think Perl 11 is an aspirational interpreter/VM that will allow both to run, as was originally intended. I do see your point though.

This push did not involve any consultation with any community. He has never contributed anything to Perl 6, let alone Raku. He continues to use Larry's image and calling him a "saint", without his consent. He does not listen to other people.

In other words: he's doing Perl the worst possibly favour.

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