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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

> raku is perl 6

It used to be, but not anymore.

It has grown to be its own thing with some happenstance parenthood through being born from an early attempt at Perl 6, and thus is now only being slightly more related to Perl than e.g Ruby is. Ok I'm pushing it but you get the idea: taking a biological analogy, it has mutated away far enough that it is now considered to be its own strain.

And if that helps clear some doubts, Perl 7 is on the table (if there ever needs to be a Perl 7):

    At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. If that happens, then the version will be bumped to 7.0.

https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-pe...

So Raku cannot be Perl 6!

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Well right, "perl 6" quickly became a bad name for the project - they should have switched to something like "raku" maybe 20 years ago.

Given that, nobody got the memo, so calling it "perl 6" is still a very fast way to orient people as to what it's a neighbor of.

It's what happens when Larry Wall says "Hold My Beer" to ruby?

Maybe a fast way but is it a fair or even helpful way, if you recognize that it "quickly became a bad name for the project"?

It is helpful for people who were paying attention to the perl community with any passing interest at any time in the past 20 years. It is not helpful for people who weren't. But the former describes a lot of people here.

Absolutely! In the same way that saying the "Dugong Dugon" is a type of fish even though it's technically a Sirenia.

Here, "some swimming creature" is the totality of the objective, we aren't trying to do a crash course in marine zoology or trying to explain what a Sirenia is or what a fish technically means.

Saying it's perl-6 means that it's not say, lisp-like or some kind of prolog or haskell. It's a relatively swift approximation and that's the totality of the objective.

It was Perl 6 from 2000 to 2019. It spent much more time as perl6 than it has as not-perl6.

No. Pug was the Perl 6 until rakudo took over. Raku was not until rakudo.

I don't think the mutation analogy really works.

C of 40 years ago is nothing like modern c.

Same for basic.

I just found out recently that many k&r c'isms are actually obsoleted as in will break the compiler.

    int foo(s, f)
     char* s;
     float f;
    { ... }

That notably is now broken as per C 2X

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