develooper Front page | perl.perl6.language | Postings from January 2002

Perl6 -- what is in a name?

From:
Aaron Sherman
Date:
January 28, 2002 07:44
Subject:
Perl6 -- what is in a name?
Message ID:
1012232660.623.28.camel@pps
I'm going to just say this, and I ask that everyone who reads it take a
deep breath, count to 10 and then respond if you wish.

I was reading Apoc 4 and while marveling at the elegence of what Larry's
doing to the language, I had an epiphany. Perl6 is simply not Perl. It's
about as much Perl as Perl1 was AWK, C and Bourne Shell. I'm not saying
that there's anything wrong with Perl6, or that it's on the wrong track.
I love it, and want to start using it tomorrow. However, it is clearly a
new species, and just as we do not call "Homo Sapiens Sapiens", "Homo
Erectus 3", I am beginning to come around to the opinion that Perl6 is a
poor choice of name for this new language.

Aesthetics asside, the name implies continuity, and while that
continuity is planned in terms of compatibility modes and anscestral
influence, is that really sufficient? If Python X.0 included a Perl5
parser/compat mode and had many Perl features added, would *it* be
Perl6? Is it Perl6 simply because Larry is its author (this makes AWK,
C2 by extension)? If the language is named "Pint" (an example, not a
suggestion), would this help new users to accept its features on its own
terms instead of bristling over every way in which they are not Perl's?
I don't know, but it seemed like a topic worthy of some discussion.

What I don't want to start (and I may have done so anyway) is a simple
name war. If you feel emotionally attached to "Perl", then fine, so am
I. But if you feel that there is some compelling logic here that will
affect the community, I would be very interested.

If someone has already brought this up, I appologize. I read as much of
this list as I can while still getting "real work" done ;-)





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