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Re^2: It has been suggested to rename Perl 6 in order to boost its marketing potential. Which name would you prefer?

by hippo (Bishop)
on Jul 02, 2018 at 12:23 UTC ( [id://1217734]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: It has been suggested to rename Perl 6 in order to boost its marketing potential. Which name would you prefer?
in thread It has been suggested to rename Perl 6 in order to boost its marketing potential. Which name would you prefer?

Everybody will immediately understand that the name change is merely done as an attempt to gain marketing potential.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. This poll is the first time I've read of anyone suggesting that improving P6's marketing would be a driver behind changing its name. OTOH, there have been calls for years to change the name for entirely different reasons: to avoid the implication that it's just the latest version of Perl, to free up 6 as the next major release of Perl, etc. If the name had changed today I would have assumed that it was for one or more of these long-discussed reasons and not anything to do with improving the P6 marketing effort.

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Re^3: It has been suggested to rename Perl 6 in order to boost its marketing potential. Which name would you prefer?
by woolfy (Chaplain) on Jul 02, 2018 at 12:57 UTC
    Improving the Perl 6 marketing effort can be done in many more effective ways, and I have been doing that myself by making available, to many people, at quite some Perl- and other open source events, marketing materials as stickers, buttons, tuits, brochures, books, Camelia stuffed toy butterflies, pens, and more. And by sponsoring events where talks, presentations, and other information about Perl 6 was given. And other ways of sponsoring. By the way, I have done the same for Perl 5 (and in this case, instead of stuffed toy butterflies, I have sold many stuffed toy camels). I have sponsored books to be written.

    And lots more need to be done, both for Perl 5 and for Perl 6. Things like articles written in blogs, magazines, newspapers and elsewhere. Educational materials made available for schools, universities, training and other institutes. Reacting to misinformation, insults, and other negative writings against Perl (both 5 and 6). Showing our good will: no flame wars, less code obfuscation, modern Perl, best practices, friendliness, welcoming newbies, presence at open source events, good documentation, good examples, and much more. I would like to see many more people doing the same and more.

    A name change is artificial. It is not real marketing. It is giving in to people who don't like what has happened in the past, to people who claim that Perl 6 has damaged Perl 5. If the name of Perl 6 was changed to anything else, everybody will know "ah, that was Perl 6". The 8 books that are finished now ("Learning Perl 6" is finished, but not published as of this moment) need to be renamed. A name change will do more harm than good.

    Perl 5 has its own future: so much code has been written, has to be maintained, that it will be used for decades to come. If Perl 6 will continue to be developed like it is now, gaining more modules, gaining more ways to execute Perl 5 code without much that has to be changed, getting faster every year, at some point it may be deemed the next major release of Perl (at the moment, it has the potential, but quite some things need to be done).
      A name change will do more harm than good.
      While it certainly could be harmful, I'm not convinced that it necessarily would be.

      I've seen something similar in recent years which backs this up: In the ancient days of the late 70s, RuneQuest was released (a tabletop RPG, for anyone unfamiliar with the name). Its fortunes rose and fell, but it stuck around well enough that, some years ago, RuneQuest 6 was released. A couple years later, ownership of the "RuneQuest" trademark changed hands and the new owners chose to withdraw RQ6's license to use the name so that they could create their own new edition of RuneQuest which returned to the game's roots, as RQ6 had grown to be a very different beast from the earlier editions of RQ. Not wanting to abandon their work, the authors/publishers of RQ6 renamed it "Mythras".

      The renaming of RQ6 to Mythras has caused no harm to the game or its publisher, despite the fears of many of its fans (myself included). There were a couple years of people referring to the game as "Mythras (formerly RQ6)" for audiences who might not be aware of the name change, but Mythras is getting to be known well enough under the new name that this practice seems to be dying out. Really, the only ill effect I can see to the change is that it's less googlable, since, unless you're careful with your search terms, you'll get more hits for Mithraism than for the game.

      Now, granted, RPGs and programming languages are different and the Perl 6 name has been around a lot longer than the RQ6 name was, but P6 has also gotten a lot more bad press than RQ6 did. I don't claim to know where the balance would be likely to end up between the harm from lost name recognition and the gain from distancing the language from that bad press.

      In the end, though, as you reminded us, Larry doesn't want to change the name and he has the last word on it, making all of this academic.

        I wonder ... did Perl6 actually ever get any good press?

        Jenda
        Enoch was right!
        Enjoy the last years of Rome.

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