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Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of Perl5 users that have never liked the idea of "Perl6" and swear that they will never use it. That is just one of the reasons why Perl6 took awhile to release. It was not made by the Perl5 community, it was/is a different community although it does have some Perl5 guys strewn through it. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I plan on picking it up soon. So yes, non-perl people should try it. Other than the name, and Larry Wall, there is not much the same between the two.

I am not following your issues with the versioning. Perl6 was supposed to be released like back in 2005 or so. In that context it made sense that the next release of Perl would be 6 and that the 5 series would just go into maintenance only mode. But that didn't really happen. Perl5 devs continued to do their own thing while a new community was built around Perl6 with different people.

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> I am not following your issues with the versioning.

As I understand it, Perl 6 is essentially a complete language overhaul. However, the sequential numbering implies an iteration. To me, that's unintuitive.

At the risk of over-analogizing, it's a bit as if Scala had been released as Java (n). Totally, completely irrational? Maybe not. Confusing? Almost certainly.

Think of Perl5 and Perl6 as American English and British English. Both languages are English, but essentially they are different languages but with a similar foundation.

> Confusing? Almost certainly.

Agreed. I don't know if it would've been better for Perl6 to not have 'Perl' in its name, but it almost surely would have been better for Perl5 if Perl6 hadn't had 'Perl' in its name.

> Think of Perl5 and Perl6 as American English and British English

This is a bit pedantic, but I think a better analogy might be Dutch and German - similar roots, but where fluency in one doesn't confer fluency in the other.

Granted, I haven't touched Perl 6 so the magnitude of difference I'm estimating is based off of a very superficial impression.

Python 2 & 3 might be somewhat akin to American & British English.

> It almost surely would have been better for Perl5 if Perl6 hadn't had 'Perl' in its name

Agreed. From a distance, there's definitely the sense that Perl5 was sacrificed for the benefit of Perl6.

Actually I remember reading somewhere that when Perl 6 was just getting started, it motivated a number of Perl 5 devs to hunker down and improve Perl 5. Almost in opposition to the new somewhat-alien syntax of Perl 6.

At this point I think most programmers are at least slightly aware of the 5/6 debacle and I feel that both languages actually benefit from it! It makes people think about versioning, sisterhood, and syntax! Which are all important things for programmers to think about. But really, everyone's got an opinion on the matter and that's kind of what makes it so great.

Historically, Perl6 was supposed to be the next version of Perl (replace Perl5). There was a plan for Perl5 and Perl6 to share a new virtual machine and for there to be some sort of compatibility layer so that Perl6 could run Perl5 code. However when it started to take decades to complete Perl6, and when it started to become clear that Perl6 was so different from Perl5 that it was essentially a new language, working Perl5 developers started working on Perl5 again and porting as many Perl6 features as possible to Perl5 (although typically not as new minor versions of Perl5, but as modules on CPAN). So for example we have Moose which brings a lot of the best bits of Perl6 objects to Perl5. As a result many Perl5 programmers stopped waiting to be saved by Perl6 and just got on with it. Over time the distance between Perl5 and Perl6 communities grew, despite some efforts at unification, so that now the fact that both languages share the Perl name is a bit silly (in my opinion, but I know that's not universally shared). In fact there's been moments of hostility between the communities, over the Perl name and so forth. So sorry this is confusing to you, you are rightly confused and it saddens me that it happened. I wish that when it became clear that Perl6 was not replacing Perl5 that we'd have chosen a new name for Perl6. Unfortunately the groups running this are not democratically chosen people to represent the Perl community, just people that showed up and did work, so they often don't feel or care about the confusion. What I usually do is consider Perl5 the language and the version is 22 (the current release of Perl5), and I think of Perl6 as being alpha or beta for version zero. If you consider the number part of the language title it sorta can make some sense.

"intuitions" have nothing to do with it ... you simply aren't knowledgeable about programming languages and their history. Perl 6 looks more like Perl 5 than Perl 5 looked like Perl 4, and the same goes for the earlier versions of Perl, as well as FORTRAN, Modula, Simula, Algol, and other languages with numbers in their names. These numbers are not simply release or version numbers.

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