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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

perl 6/raku was a redesign. as far as i remember, upgradeability from perl 5 without code changes was never the goal.

It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

> It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.

Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.

Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10 years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before giving up on it again. Might be time to take another look.

There is a Perl 5 compatibility mode: it's called Inline::Perl5.

Maybe not the one that was originally planned. But that was only a real possibility if Perl 5 would be able to get rid of its XS addiction.

Ask yourself: how many of the up river Perl modules are Perl only?

Agreed. Probably why they renamed it. I think everybody probably wishes they'd taken a new name from the start.

Isn't that the definition of a breaking change?

yeah, in the same sense that D is a breaking change for C, or wayland for X11. the point is that as far as i know it was never intended that existing perl 5 code would be rewritten. unlike the python 2 to 3 change where the intention was that people would convert using 2to3 and later using compatibility modules that allowed writing code that works with both. python 2 development stopped after 12 years, much later than they expected.

If Ford makes a 4-door passenger car, and then comes out with a 2-door sports car, and keeps producing both cars, that's not a breaking change. It's just a new car.

Perl 5 is still supported, Perl 6 (Raku) continues independently.

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