Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

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My understanding is that there is Perl 5 (which is Perl) and a completely separate language known as Raku that was originally supposed to be Perl 6. This happened as Perl 6 took so long (similar to Duke Nukem Forever) that large portions of the Perl community decided it wasn't a realistic upgrade path and the languages had a hard fork.

Perl7 seems to be Perl5 with some changes to the defaults. They can't upgrade to Perl6 as that would be needlessly confusing. If foresight were perfect, Perl6 would have always been a different language name so Perl proper would continue without confusion. The problem was that they had no idea how hard it would be to make Perl6 and thus thought it would be ready in a few years (my understanding) and everyone would upgrade. Raku/Perl6 is SERIOUSLY COOL. I think it just needs a larger community and that's a chicken/egg problem.

Your understanding is mostly accurate.

Perl 6 was intended from the start to be the next major release of Perl (at various times, a replacement for a 5.10 or 5.12 or 5.14), and it was intended to have a backwards compatibility mode to run 5.8 (or 5.10 or 5.12) code in the same process, with full interoperability.

As time went by, that plan became less and less likely. Some people came up with the idea that Perl and P6 were "sister languages", both to have new major releases. I think this happened sometime around 2009 or so, maybe as early as 2007.

Also by 2011 or so, the P6 developers effectively scuttled the backwards compatibility plan and code written to that point, but I've argued that their plan to replace Parrot was a mistake enough here and elsewhere already. (Sometimes I wonder, now that MoarVM is older than Parrot was when Parrot was declared unsuitable, if they've achieved their promised speed and compatibility goals.)

Thanks Chromatic!

Well the raku community may be small (1300 ish on reddit) but it is very welcoming and there is lots to help out with (RakuAST anyone?). There are 2200 or so modules on www.raku.land (plus Inline::Perl5, Inline::Python, CFFI and so on) - I learn something every day by rubbing shoulders with some amazing experts!

Yep. I hope I didn't comes across as negative. It's a good community from what I've seen.

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