Re:What Happened to Perl 7?
by dale_glass on Thursday May 26, 2022 @09:19AM
(#31517973)
I agree, good clarification.
It's a pity really, lots of people worked hard on it, and I think things could have worked out better by just better messaging. Doing the "Perl 6 to Raku" renaming early on might have salvaged things.
I think this is an important lesson -- technical skills are great, but communication is extremely important.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I would like to emphasize the ordering of these events: first "Perl 6 was finally released", and only later was it "decided that Perl 6 wasn't really Perl 6 [...] and renamed to Raku to signal this". It was too late not only because most everyone had already moved on (by the reasons you mentioned: why would anyone invest in Perl 5, when the migration to Perl 6 would throw away all that investment?), but also because Perl 6 had already been released under the "Perl 6" name.