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Re^11: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6"
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 02, 2019 at 20:02 UTC
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Our sub thread started here Re: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6" and was about potential future optimisations.
You are concentrating in repeating what went wrong in the past and how promises were broken.
Yes. Exactly.
But you've also been a poster boy of this management group for a decade.
Sure. That's why I stopped. After 10 years of evidence that promises would be broken, I stopped believing the people who made those promises over and over again.
Why should I believe them now, after another 8 years of broken promises?
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It's not about believing but having a scientifically sound (hence productive) discussion.
Jonathan shows stuff in this video, you can watch it and share your opinion.
Where we agree: Perl5 should certainly not count on Perl6 to save the day.
> I stopped believing the people who made those promises over and over again.
Well you were one of the promise makers and I believed them.
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Re^11: Ovid's take on the renaming of "Perl6"
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Sep 02, 2019 at 19:40 UTC
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Damian … said it's "already too late."
I agree. I have no clear idea how a rename will help anyone at this point unless the porters decide to release the next update as Perl 7 the same time the rename happens. But still, without some significant marketing dollars spread around—and maybe an extremely good app or two—it will harm more than help. There will be no differentiator in the release, unless signatures and some OO become bombproof, non-experimental core. The widespread, entrenched hatred for Perl 5 will commute directly to Perl 7 with newly strengthened critiques: look at this mess, it hasn’t changed, it’s just a trick, the upgrade cycle will kill everyone’s apps, as if Perl had any apps, compatibility is impossible with a double version jump, talk about your backpedalling! et cetera, et cetera.
And FTR I still disagree, strongly, that Perl 6 hurt Perl 5 particularly or in the grand scheme. Perl 5 was circling the drain *beforehand*. That was the entire genesis. Perl 6 caused some confusion but less division of effort than claimed and it brought back-ported improvements and renewed interest. Without that, I don’t know that Perl 5 wouldn’t be in worse shape today.
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https://www.perl6.org/archive/doc/apocalypse.html
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I slightly agree, again. The schism about backcompt, features, core clean-up, had made Perl 5 progress difficult, social as much as technical, and Perl 6 seemed like a natural and well-timed path out of that; then. mod_perl was unsuitable, untenable as a tool to keep Perl on top of the web. It needed a complete rewrite and rethink. Something like WSGI and supporting app servers. That was *not* forthcoming. No one with the skills stepped up. I certainly didn’t have the chops to do so or even understand what was needed at the time. A large part of the community put its nose in the air about stooping so low when we already had mod_perl, a thing of grace and power in its class. Nothing else would have helped send PHP where it belongs. Thank goodness for Miyagawa. No, wait, just thank Miyagawa! :P
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I'm a fan of clean names that avoid confusion. Perl++ would be an accurate description of the intent and draw a direct analog to C++.
How a backwards compatible successor to Perl5 should be named ... no idea. Maybe leaping to 10 like Autocad did?
But I agree that this must be accompanied with clear improvements like signatures (and/or an OO System).
Anything else would be quickly ridiculed as marketing gag.
> that Perl 6 hurt Perl 5 particularly or in the grand scheme.
I claim Osborning, AFAIK Perl5 releases in the 200x years were rare because everybody was expecting Perl6 to arrive. That's a normal psychological effect.
And when Perl6 was officially released I personally witnessed the aftermath of a very strange and loud discussion of my clients to switch as soon as possible to the "newer version".
PS: FWIW: you may want to watch my talk about "The Camel Paradox" (not sure if slides and sound are out of sync or if I was in Muppet mode again ;-)
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Perl5 releases in the 200x years were rare because everybody was expecting Perl6 to arrive.
My memory is that the porter list was already bogged down to a near standstill and it had little to nothing to do with Perl 6 because there was already a complete schism of attitudes and a growing abandonment of Perl 5, not because of the promise of Perl 6 but the lack of agreement on features and backcompat and the open road of Ruby and Python and the corporate enforcement of Java. It was a small handful of devs who sparked the renaissance around 2005 and the following years and—not to take away from the amazing, crucial, gracious work and dedication of folks like dave_the_m—it was entirely framework based. Even a piece of crap like PHP will thrive with useful, easily deployed, applications/frameworks.
Yahoo and Amazon both decided to abandon Perl completely independently of Perl 6. I was at Amazon when it happened and it was a year, maybe 18 months, before Jon Orwant threw those mugs.
Perl 6, to me, is about 10th on the list of Perl 5 problems (with PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, and others taking all top slots) while still in the top set of things that helped it survive. Even today, infighting over Perl 6 is worse than Perl 6 ever was… ECMAScript is the most likely candidate to relegate Perl 5 to permanent maintenance mode.
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