> Perl 6 was misnamed
Damian Conway agrees with you - but Larry Wall decides, and he insisted on calling it Perl 6. Maybe Conway has a point, but maybe so many people wouldn't have worked so hard on it for so long if it was called something else.
As someone that uses Perl daily I totally agree with you.
The name not only is bad for newcomers but also for Perl itself. Perl 5.0.0 was released in 1994 (!), today's Perl 5.20 is miles ahead but we can't bump the version because it would only make things even more confusing..
> and people who aren't already Perl hackers are going to think it's the same old Perl that scared them off ages ago.
consire though, that perl6 is soon going to be 20 years old, there is a whole generation of devs which were never scared off by perl5 at all. I say this as someone who, ten years ago, didn't understand a lot of the complains about perl because they were mostly directed at perl4 problems :)
Re:Three Tales of Second System Syndrome
by DonHopkins on Monday May 04, 2015 @03:10PM
(#9488351)
Perl unless true
The Perl 5 diehards aren't going to switch, and people who aren't already Perl hackers are going to think it's the same old Perl that scared them off ages ago.
It's a shame, because Perl 6 is a great language (and I say this as somebody who was put off by Perl 5), and the Parrot VM is particularly awesome.
It also has some of the best error reporting I've seen: it offers a number of possible solutions, and if you try to use a Perl 5-ism that's not supported anymore, it'll tell you what the Perl 6 equivalent is.