Thank you for that insight, most of us on the outskirts don't know the internal details. By outskirts, I mean the mere mortal users of the language like myself, who may not contribute to the core lang, but we evangelize and keep the language alive. It may seem irresponsible that we voice an opinion w/o having actually lived the internals of the ordeal, but ultimately a computer language, no matter how great, can only be kept alive if it's able to maintain a strong and loyal community of people that actually love and use thing in their daily work.

Yes, the marketing did suck and that's the key takeaway, because it felt like disfranchisement of the community at large. For example, I remember an early talk about Perl 6 at OSCON (IIRC by Damian Conway) and honestly the invariant sigil thing rubbed me the wrong way, in fact it pissed me off. It didn't feel like an evolution to me. It felt more like we were succumbing to pressures to keep the language "clean", which I believe is exactly the opposite of what gives Perl and it's community the charm in the first place. Like the sigils there was a whole bunch of little (and some, not so little) changes like that made people feel "betrayed". Call it stupid, childish, cargo cult, or whatever but the result is in the pudding.

Larry is brilliant, no doubt about that. But the Perl 6 branding was, in hindsight, nefarious. By Larry's talk at Google in 2008, it should have been OBVIOUS that calling this "Perl 6" was a really bad idea, and maybe there could have been a chance of an earlier course correction, but by that time, and IMHO, the damage was already done. Although not as much damage, of course, as waiting until 2019 to realize this.

Like Steve Jobs once said "it's easy connecting the dots looking backwards" and for those of us that weren't there it seems obvious to us now, but if you were there, right smack in the middle of it, like woolfy's case, my OP must seem very insulting. Again, it was not my intention, and I fully acknowledge that I don't have the moral authority to express a qualified forensic opinion on the matter. Nevertheless, I can assure you that a lot of people on both sides of the isle felt GREAT RELIEF when the rebranding of Raku was announced as well as the announcement of the release of Perl 7. It was alike a HUGE weight was lifted, and I think a lot of people would agree with this.

Who knows, maybe we can all agree on this, lick the wounds, and move on. Let's continue to make Perl and it's offspring the best languages on earth!!

Thanks again for the great discussion!

Alex

In reply to Re^4: Why Perl in 2020 by ait
in thread Why Perl in 2020 by ait

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