I truly apologize if this generated any bad sentiment. Maybe I could have used a better choice of words, but I was trying to preach a reconciliatory message here, so pls. don’t kill the messenger. The result of Perl 6 is what it is, regardless of the effort and intention. I surely am not blaming Perl 6 per se, or targeting any particular group, and much less any individuals. When I say “ management” I am referring to the marketing aspects, not the execution and/or the product as such. My point is that it should have never been advertised as Perl 6. And this started with Larry Wall himself...

You don’t start a new version of a product by advertising: well you know what, Perl 5 is hopelessly broken and I’m going to set out to do it right this time. Lots of people were quite happy with the sigils and obscure magic variables and all the other quirks of Perl 5, and felt betrayed. There was no need to start off a project by trashing your old design and alienate a big portion of your loyal followers who actually love these “features” that you are NOW calling design flaws. People may not want to admit it in public, Mr. Wall, but I personally found that very distasteful and hypocritical when you’ve been preaching almost the opposite in the past few decades (linguistic origins, write what you mean, TIMTOWTDI, etc.) So NOW we want to clean up the language and make it more “appealing” and “correct”. How do you think that made the community feel as whole? When the founder himself is almost saying: well Perl 5 was fun but it was a mistake. Let’s create a language for the “future generations”, wtf? What happened to THIS generation, where do I, the CURRENT Perl hacker fit into all this? That OBVIOUSLY alienated a lot of people from BOTH Perl 5 AND Perl 6.

And if that wasn’t enough damage, we top it off by calling it Perl 6, and then take over a decade to deliver it. Making the whole language and both communities (now weakened and divided) become the laughing stock of the Internet. Like you, a lot of people simply left, and we let Python take over the world, even in bioinformatics! THAT is shameful. Everybody is angry and sad. It’s not just you. It’s all of us. We ALL screwed up, and we ALL lost, my friend.

The post was not about trying to show off a supreme bit of wisdom. It was to finally say that it’s time to heal and it’s time for both projects to succeed in their own right. Perl 6 was never a successor of Perl 5, and that is clear to everyone now. THAT is what I meant by “shadow” and I’m sorry you took it the wrong way,

It was a mistake that it started the way it did, but I am sure that no one had bad intent, especially not Mr. Wall, and surely none of us in the mere mortal user community. But the fact of the matter is, that a starting a NEW language and calling it Perl 6, hurt everyone. And I think it’s time we allow for these two projects to heal, make peace, and move forward in their own right, and hopefully together.

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