I vote for Perlemacs, myself.
]]>Sorry, couldn't resist.
]]>"Perlemacs, Camel Rep."
]]>i think camelia is not a good name. and i also disagree that perl 5.16 should be called perl 16 because its an anual version. major numbers should switch when soemthing major happens. and yes Perl 6 maybe shoule named MetaPerl or a wird with a meaning in that direction because its a meta language.
]]>I wouldn't call Perl 5.16.x Perl 16, in a similar fashion to Emacs being Emacs 23 instead of Emacs 1.23, though.
]]>Quoting from the Perl wiki: At that time, the primary goals were to remove "historical warts" from the language; "easy things should stay easy, hard things should get easier, and impossible things should get hard; a general cleanup of the internal design and APIs"
The Perl 5 interpreter internals are a nightmare. Even if its development has revived lately it has still proved very hard to introduce new features in a sane manner. There are even critical bugs that can't be solved. And the learning curve for new people to enter into the game is almost impossible.
Then there is Perl as a language. Introducing newer features without breaking backwards compatibility can also be challenging. There is a lot of cruft on the language and misimplemented features (prototypes, attributes, threads, overloading, too much DWIM, etc.).
Compare it to other scripting languages that are able to introduce new powerful features regularly and have several lively implementations.
So, we still need a "Perl 6", maybe not the actual "Perl 6", but some other "Perl 6" more near to the current "Perl 5", internals rewritten from scratch and with the language cruft removed.
]]>Probably centered around this thing about dropping the 5 and calling the next perl "Perl 16". That assumes that Perl 5 development is doing fine. It is not.
BTW, the blog entry linked by Shlomi Fish contains a comment by Michael G. Schwern that is a must read.
]]>http://www.curmudgeonlysoftware.com/2011/05/23/perl-from-the-outside/
At some early point in my learning process I started hearing about Perl 6, a subject that seems to cause confusion even within the Perl community. Unsurprisingly, this confusion is magnified for newbies. I now know that Perl 6 is to be treated as an entirely separate language, but outsiders do not know this. To them the decade long (and still going) process to create a production quality implementation seems like a joke. When an outsider sees the names “Perl 5″ and “Perl 6″, the completly natural assumption is that “Perl 6″ is the next version of Perl. And the natural conclusion after seeing that Perl 6 was announced over a decade ago and has very little adoption, is that Perl is a dead language. I have read that Larry has spoken the final word on this issue, but that doesn’t mean it was the correct word. It just means the issue has been closed for debate. The name Perl 6 will continue to hurt the perception of the community from the outside.]]>
For everyone else, it's a mess. Also, nowadays, people only seem to notice major version increases. Firefox has switched to frequent major version increases (the new Firefox 5), Chrome is at... what? Chrome 13 or something? Emacs, Java... the list goes on.
My personal favorite would be renaming Perl 6 to Perl++. And freeing up the Perl 6 name for an actual incremental major Perl release (such as something which would make perl5i the core syntax, for instance).
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