Hacker News Reader

The consensus forming in the comments to the post seemed to be around the idea of switching to a year-based versioning system, so Perl 2013. That sounds like a great idea to me.

View on HN

Ugh, that seems terrible. It smacks of compromise, when what the perl community needs is a fresh set of ideas.

They need to name Perl 6 something else fix the image of Perl 5. Perl 6 should never have been named Perl anyway, it's a brand new language.

I think it was not clear, for a long time, just how divergent Perl 6 would turn out to be. If you look back (way back) at the original RFC process, most people were proposing fairly minor changes to the language; and it was billed as an opportunity to clean up a lot of cruft at a one-time compatibility cost. Rather like Python 3, in fact. But then it bit off more than it could chew, and as you say it is now envisaged as a new language sharing some Perl heritage.

That's true, however it's been clear for at least 4-5 years now that Perl 6 was a boondoggle.

From the outside the Perl community looks like its barely holding together.

From what I understand a lot of the Perl community mostly ignores Perl 6, and is focused on the Perl 5 base (as shown by the up-tick in development/changes on the core of Perl 5).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com