from Hacker News

Lets just drop the 5 from Perl 5

by kraih on 6/27/11, 4:29 PM with 30 comments

  • by sciurus on 6/27/11, 5:09 PM

  • by rmah on 6/27/11, 7:54 PM

    I've been espousing this for years! If java can do it, so can perl. Go go perl 14!

  • by ojosilva on 6/27/11, 10:11 PM

    And how about Perl 7? Perl 14 would feel like the Java version bump, and people would say "well Perl 5 just dropped the 5" which means nothing in fact. Perl 7 could start enforcing all "use feature" and "strict modernity" out-of-the-box and package things like Moose and sub signatures. And as a side dish, we could do a cleanup of the interpreter code for p5p mental sanity, in a "less is more" fashion.

    Actually the odd numbers could become the Perl5 series and its gradual evolution. And the evens, the experimental Perl6 series of taking computer languages where no man has gone before. But that's just pointless... it would be another 20 christmas before Perl 8 would start to materialize.

    Besides, Perl 7 is supposed to be "God's rewrite of Perl". So, here's where God comes in and Perl 7 saves us all.

  • by tete on 6/27/11, 7:48 PM

    I always liked the idea of renaming Perl 6 to Rakudo, being the major/official implementation. It's also what most other programming languages do. A major, leading implementation, as well as others following. This would also make it easier for newcomers.

  • by lorax on 6/27/11, 11:33 PM

    This seems like a change similar to the perl 5.000000000008 to 5.8 change (yes, I know it had fewer 0's in it but there were a lot).

  • by killerswan on 6/27/11, 7:03 PM

    s/Perl 6/Perl Forever/

  • by Estragon on 6/27/11, 7:07 PM

    What's Larry Wall up to these days, anyway?

  • by steipete on 6/27/11, 4:44 PM

    Why? Isn't Perl6 the "new hot" thing? You could rename Perl5 to Pearl Classic. (see Python...)

  • by smosher on 6/27/11, 6:47 PM

    That's disingenuous and doesn't clear up anything. Better: Perl 5 Version 16.

  • by Cloven on 6/28/11, 4:12 AM

    The problem with perls (5, 6, N) is that most of the competent, intelligent committers were either (a) subverted by O'Reilly contracts into being ardent defenders of the status quo, (b) fed up with waiting for years in order to get unintelligible exegeses from a chief committer who apparently lost all interest and was unable or unwilling to delegate, (c) driven into bafflement by the rivening of p5p into scads of unmanaged sublists and lost interest, (d) discovered thriving and engaged communities in languages not riddled top to bottom by political, organizational and leadership problems, or (e) fell into the black leather-winged embrace of crufty corporate nonsense that is python.

    The numbering system merely hastened the demise by further making sure that any sensible interested committer would first check to see what was going on with the latest branch, discover it was the same godawful non-navigable incompetent mess of splintered crazy version wreckage floating abandoned on a lake of ennui that you can trivially see before you today, and run like fuck in the opposite direction.

    The principal problem with perl today is that it still exists, and that last tenuous skeleton crew of 2-3 smart people who still struggle in vain to breathe life into its long dessicated corpse is still capering about claiming that there's still! some! path! to! relevance!, rather than doing the noble thing and finding employ as dishwashers or carpet cleaning fluid salesmen.