well I thought it was quite clear that I was talking about the marketing effect of an official new major release.

No, it wasn't entirely clear to me, but in this case I'm suspicious of my own biases coloring my readings of what you wrote, and it's been a long week for me. Apologies again if warranted.

Still, I claim that other than being able to call a successor-to-5-release "Perl 6", the existence of Perl 6 doesn't block improvements to Perl's marketing efforts or the ability to create "an official new major release" of Perl 5. In this respect, I think names like "Perl Renaissance" and "Modern Perl" can have a lot more impact in announcing "major release" than a simple number increment could ever do. But I also believe that Perl 5 leaders are far more qualified and capable to make those determinations than I, and I'd like to avoid any appearance of a Perl 6 leader telling the Perl 5 folks what they should be doing.

I fully agree with masak++ that the Perl 5 story could be best improved by changing the name of Perl 6. But I also agree with masak that this is not at all likely to happen anytime soon, and I conceive that although a Perl 6 name change might be best for Perl 5 today, it might not be best for Perl in the long run.

So, I want to accept our current reality for what it is, and recognize that if we're really going to honor TMTOWTDI, and if there's going to be a Perl family of languages, then let's figure out how to name and market all of our children as something more than just "4", "5", and "6". Because I think that any community that can produce brilliantly creative names like "CPANTS", "Moose" (and "MooseX"), "Lingua::Romana::Perligata", "Ponie", "Rakudo", and "phasers" can surely come up with more creative and marketable names for its flagship products than simple sequences of small numbers.

Pm

[Update: I overlooked "Strawberry Perl" in the list of brilliantly creative names associated with Perl.]

I'm a marketing type, and this situation does bug me. Flight of fancy: Perl 5 skips to Perl 7. Perl 6 gets renamed to Perl Whatever. People will weave a new set of ridiculous misunderstandings about why these name changes have occured, but my sense is that these names would work in both the short and long term for both Perl 5 and Perl 6 in both press and public contexts.

> and I conceive that although a Perl 6 name change might be best for Perl 5 today, it might not be best for Perl in the long run.

I politely dare to disagree. A name change will help both, and as I said especially the "Perl++" team will benefit.

And the longer members of your team propagate that it's "the next version" of Perl, you'll see tensions and/or ignorance growing.

> can surely come up with more creative and marketable names for its flagship products than simple sequences of small numbers.

Patrick, honestly I hate all these fantasy names without clear definition or at least intuitive or memorizable association ("phaser" as an exception has an understandable etymology). Try a poll here who actually knows the difference between Rakudo and Parrot. Thats part of this communication disaster.

I want to remind you that the official version number of Windows 2000 was NT 5 ! And I still don't understand how Delphi got such a stupid name - and always have to remind me that its Pascal.

If you would (like me) follow Python boards and see the frustration Ruby causes you might change your opinion about a fast major release of Perl5.

Look the guys in these other boards are in average at least 10 years younger than the usual Perl crowd. We are gambling the future away to become the new Cobol.

Anyway I started to answer you to offer you a way out of your frustrations¹ not out of combativeness!

Good luck! 8)

Cheers Rolf

¹) ... and not of mine. Thankfully I have an exit strategy for the worst case to migrate to a language which is named with a clear association to a gem like Perl ...