If we go all the way, and rebrand from "Perl 5" to "Pumpkin Perl 1", then we open the door to a future "Pumpkin Perl 2" that breaks backward compatibility with a major version bump.
Oh. I get it. I was so stuck on my idea that the time to get a new name was when there was a major break of backcompat that I never really saw that scenario. With the, you know, version numbers and such... Sorry 'bout that.
But I still don't love the idea. Golden's post goes on to say:
IF we think there will ever be a future Perl 5-like language/interpreter that is a significant departure from what we have today (that isn't Perl 6), then we really need a way to signify that with some sort of major bump or change in either version or nomenclature.
Right, there's my plan: change of nomenclature when there's a significant departure from the status quo. It's what strikes me as 1) good style, and 2) less risky. But it does mean doing nothing in the short-to-medium term to stem Perl's slide in popularity, and doing nothing can be risky too.
So just go for it, man. Lots of people will love it, and the rest will get over it. Might even work.
]]>You should support this proposal because by providing the current implementation with its own name, we allow alternative implementations to also have their own name and identity without linguistic complications, leading to a fair technical playing field within which they can prove themselves.
mst, as someone who believes a new implementation is the way forward (and thinks the Moe experiment might be useful here), I think the above looks like what would happen if a strawman and a non sequitur made a baby. Nobody asked for permission to make JRuby or Rubinius or Jython or Jim Tcl. If Moe were a functioning compiler that allowed something related to Perl5 to run on the JVM, we could all call it Moe even if Perl5 was still just Perl v5.xx.
In a way, renaming Perl5's current implementation seems like it might steal the thunder from any near-term re-implementation...but of course I jest. There is no near-term reimplementation.
Perhaps you didn't really mean "allow alternative[s]". Maybe you meant "encourage". At any rate, I would appreciate it if you would elucidate on your point for the reading comprehension-impaired.
]]>Stevan Little already explained that one of the reasons he decided to build from scratch with Moe is that there's a serious shortage or surgeons qualified to operate on the current Perl5 implementation. And another reason is that this implementation is a terrible candidate for major surgery. Choosing new names or numbers won't change any of that. I say wait until we have something to show the world before we trumpet huge improvements. If Moe produces an architecture and a new slimmer core that we can build both backward-compat modules and great-leap-forward modules on, THEN talk about what to call it.
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