<rant>

Yes, this is a rant. I'm trying to rant less. But this is something I feel have to say, in the admittedly faint hope that it will reach the ears of someone in charge.

Today I went to look at "Perl 6." The Perl Weekly newsletter has been turning more and more into a promotional rag for "Perl 6," and then I saw that a good deal of the London Perl Workshop has been dedicated to it. So, after 20 years more or less of programming perl, I figured I should at least swing by and see what all the distraction is about.

Lo and behold when I get to the website of the "plucky little sister of Perl 5" (who wrote this marketing pablum, a 20-yr old Communications major?), I am greeted by a multicolored butterfly that looks like it belongs on the Disney Channel early-afternoon lineup.

What the HEY?!

Are you out of your MIND?

In the interests of keeping this rant short, I'll just say that if you were trying to convince serious programmers that "Perl 6" was worth any of their time to investigate, you could not have chosen a less effective design. To me this kindergarden art symbolizes:

• shallowness
• infantilism
• dumbing down to try to widen the appeal
• the ascendency of communications-major type people over critical thinkers and engineers
• Microsoft Windows (remember the paper clip?)
• the complete lack of seriousness of "Perl 6" as a programming language

and so on.

I write Perl for a living, for companies that use it to do business and make money. It's serious stuff, and it's fun because of how challenging it is, not because of a pink and purple anthropomorphic icon.

To the "Perl 6" people: I was already very skeptical of your project, given its debaculous history. Well, now I am convinced. You could not have done more to prove to me that, as I suspected, it is a vanity project of a handful of the brightest, most bored Perl 5 gurus, that has no application in the real world in which I live and program.

To be clear, your butterfly has turned me off from even beginning to read the content of your site, and I would imagine that I am very far from being the only one.

(Note: I looked for a place on the "Perl 6" website to post this as feedback, but no such link was to be found.)

Larry Wall would be rolling in his grave. Oh, wait ...

But for the rest of you, if you were that bored, couldn't you have just gone off quietly and tackled some new field of human endeavour if you were "over" Perl, like, for example, how tchrist became the arbiter of all aspects of the English language on Stackexchange? Why the need to try to "rebrand" Perl as a consumer product for millenial schoolgirls?

Can't Perl users file a class-action suit or something to force the Butterfly People to pick another name for their hobby?

</rant>

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