Meanwhile, Perl 5 development continued in the background, and they decided that it'd jump version from 5 to 7 to avoid confusion. Perl 7 is the direct descendant of Perl 5, with the same syntax, new features and very few deprecated things.
Did you read the FA? They decided that, "Yeah nevermind: we're not going to call it Perl 7 ", until some future time where it may make sense to do so to somebody again - but maybe not, who knows? Backwards compatibility, everyone!
I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.
> Did you read the FA? They decided that, "Yeah nevermind: we're not going to call it Perl 7 ", until some future time where it may make sense to do so to somebody again - but maybe not, who knows? Backwards compatibility, everyone!
I admit I only skimmed it, I was busy at the time. But it's not too incorrect anyway: Perl 7 will be a direct descendant of Perl 5, whenever that happens.
> I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.
I don't think there's a general "Perl community". I mean it's a thing that exists, but as I see it, it's a smaller and tighter group than the general set of people using Perl. There were lots of people that used Perl for whatever needs they had and were never regulars at conventions, Perlmonks and other places, and as a result had little influence and weren't up to date on what the core people were doing.
Many of those also had no interest in committing to such a thing. Eg, they were writing stuff for their day job, and had little interest in participating in the development of the language.
I think quite a few people are confused by the line about it becoming Perl 7 "sometime in the future". I think it is unlikely that that is the distant future, myself. I think the main hang-up is they'd like to get the new built-in object system (Corinna) working.
If you're a "move fast and break things" kind-of guy, watching the perl devs in action will annoy you, because they're committed to not breaking things, and if they have to move slow to avoid it, they will.
On the other hand, if you want to be sloppy with your own perl code, or work with CPAN modules that move faster, that's up to you.
Did you read the FA? They decided that, "Yeah nevermind: we're not going to call it Perl 7 ", until some future time where it may make sense to do so to somebody again - but maybe not, who knows? Backwards compatibility, everyone!
I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.