On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 08:44:30AM -0500, B. Estrade wrote: > As an outside observer and long time fan, Perl 6 for me is more of a > formalization of the Perl language as it evolved (greatly influenced > by non-languages, such as Unix itself and natural language goals). > But, the truth is that it's not Perl 5 and it's not meant to replace > it (right?). It's an evolutionary step as the language itself moves > towards a more formalized specification. My point is that while it > started out as a way to improve/formalize Perl 5, it's developed > sufficiently to the point where it is its own language and not the > "next" version of 'perl'.
If Perl 6 is successful, long term it will replace Perl 5, in the same way that Perl 5 replaced Perl 4. Increasingly, new projects will be written in Perl 6, and eventually all the old projects using Perl 5 will retire. But this will take a long time - much longer than the transition from Perl 4. With Perl 4 to Perl 5, it was the same people releasing Perl 5 as had worked on Perl 4, so all development stopped on Perl 4 when Perl 5 came out. Not just "new features", but bug fixing and maintenance releases.* There is much less overlap between the people working on the Perl 6 and Perl 5, so Perl 5 isn't suddenly going to stop when a production ready post "early adopter" Perl 6 implementation ships. But once Perl 6 starts to close the gap on the areas where Perl 5 currently leads, then the for more and more people the advantages of choosing Perl 6 over Perl 5 will start to outweigh the disadvantages. > And finally, if the formalization becomes known as "OpenPerl" or > something as standards "sounding", then the 'perl' interpreter (aka > Perl 5), can clearly state as a goal something like, "progress towards > the OpenPerl standard while maintaining strict backward compatibility > with <insert qualification>." All of a sudden you have a Perl "family" Realistically, that's not going to happen. The internals of the Perl 5 interpreter are not flexible enough to implement a lot of the features that Perl 6 has that Perl 5 does not. Nicholas Clark * Or Python 2 to Python 3, as far as I can tell as an outsider.
