I wish the name had been different. I’m not invested in Perl6 though I think it’s quite interesting. But I’m curious because this dead horse is just bones and hair now and no one currently regular on PM has any authority in the matter and you cannot petition the Lord with prayer…

So, what does Perl7 look like to you and who makes it? Because to me, the anti-Perl6 stuff rambles somewhere between absolute fantasy and psychopathy. Give a real world, actionable plan for how to transition Perl5 to Perl7, please. And explain exactly who is going to do it. What it looks like. Exact feature sets. How it fixes the numerous issues holding back the P5 codebase. When it will be delivered. Et cetera.

How it fixes the numerous issues holding back the P5 codebase.

For that we'd have to know what are the numerous issues holding back the P5 codebase. Some in the Monastery seem very keen for a built-in, performant, consistent approach to function signatures so that might be one such issue. Other than that I can't immediately think of any.

The deep magick in it causing difficulty in adding wishlist stuff, the porters having rather different views on back compat, the dearth of qualified and interested developers. The only one regularly here I’m aware of who is qualified to comment on it for real is dave_the_m.

As Jenda hinted, the main reason for p5p (who else?) to release version 7 of Perl is to end the impression that "Perl6" is a newer version of Perl than the current 5.x one.

They wouldn't have to add a single feature or solve a single issue for that to be a win.

They could do it in place of 5.30 and that would be that.

And it's hardly a dead horse when the leading "Perl6" promoter begs Larry Wall to endorse it.)



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

…I don’t see this confusion in the marketplace, only an increased interest in the language by name and the actual language which I agree is still Perl5; that’s the only conclusion anyone comes to right now. It’s a dead horse here on PM without a meaningful audience. Rename could be great; I’m not even sure at this point. It’s mostly up to TimToady. Perl7… that’s its own can of worms and without a major new feature or two I think it would be seen as confusing, scary (oh, we’re not sure our code will be compatible with 7!), or a shallow marketing ploy and do more harm than good.

Update: I was glad you posted the item and generally agree. I didn’t mean to sound otherwise; just wasn’t happy to see the thread revived.