On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 2:15 PM, Aaron Sherman <a...@ajs.com> wrote: > ... > IMHO, 6 has always been the personal name, but it could be changed to > something that's "sixish" without being an explicit number. Normally, I'd > recommend Latin, but Perl Sex is probably not where anyone wants to go... >
Greek: ExiPerl / PerlExi (PerlExi sounds a bit like "perl lexer," which is a good) but that wasn't my thought for the name update. It started off as a variant of "Plural" (Plerl) and evolved into "Perls" - "Perls" looks and sounds like "Perl". It's Perl with one more letter. - It's a contraction of "Perl six" - Looking like an English plural noun harkens to the "more than one way to do it" ethic. - Looking like an English plural noun hints at the ideal of multiple implementations. - Easy to web search without false positives. The thing is, Zoffix makes the point of moving to a name that doesn't sound like Perl, by which reasoning "plerl" would be better than "perls", and "rakudo" even better by that criterion. And then there's how "rakudo" is already named in many files, databases, websites, and that's enough to make me think it's a "good enough" name. Though I'd like to change that implementation's name to something else if we start calling the language Rakudo! I quite like having the distinction between the language and its implementations. No one confuses C with cc, gcc, pcc, tcc, mvcc, XCode, or Borland. Using the name "rakudo" to mean the language makes me feel a little bad in that it muddies that distinction further, and gives this current implementation a special status. A status which it earned, we're not talking about calling the Perl6 language "pugs" or "parrot" or "niecza" for a reason. /me shrugs.
