On 2018-02-09 12:55 PM, Eaglestone, Robert J wrote:
I think a name change is too radical. /And yet/.
I think Steve has a point, though I don’t know what to do about it. The
developers in my little corner of the world may not be up on the
new-language-of-the-week, but even they see Perl as a has-been, write-only
language, so when their brain matches /perl/i they automatically toss it in the
bit bucket. Some of them are too nice to say it outright. Some aren’t.
Personally I think having the "6" as part of the name is the worst part of the
situation. Its too confusing with a version number.
I think if we want to keep "Perl" in the name we should use "C" as a precedent.
Other related languages keeping "C" include "Objective C", "C#", "C++", and its
much more clear those are separate languages, even if C-alike.
So one way or another, "6" should be dropped from the name of the language
formally. Then we either have "Foo Perl" or "Perl Foo" or "Foo".
After this is done, regular "Perl" can also be free to increment its first
version number for major releases (albeit skipping 6 to avoid confusion) just as
Postgres and many other projects do these days, as staying at 5.x forever is weird.
-- Darren Duncan