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Postings from February 2007
On 5 Feb 2007, at 21:20, Andy Lester wrote:
> People never ask me "Tell me what work is being done on Parrot and
> Perl 6." They say "When will Perl 6 be out?" That is a question
> that continues to be unanswerable.
Too late to change now, but presumably the problem is that it's
called Perl 6. If it was called Perl NG or something and the 6.x.x
version line was available for evolutions of the current code there'd
be far less of a PR problem.
In PR terms Perl is the "language who's next version has been more
than five years in development with no end in sight and nobody in the
community who can even tell you how it's going"
It could have been "Perl is an actively developed language. The core
developers roll out new versions on a fairly regular basis, bugs are
fixed promptly and it has spawned an extremely interesting research
project, Perl NG, to develop an exciting new Perl-like language which
promises to advance the state of the art not just for Perl but for
many other popular interpreted languages"
Same facts more or less, different names.
I'm not knocking Perl 6 in the slightest but if it walks like an open
ended research project and talks like an open ended research project...
Maybe the thing to emphasise in PR terms is that the next version of
Perl is 5.10, then 5.12 etc rather than 6. Like this:
Q. When will the next version of Perl be complete?
A. Perl 5.10 is scheduled for release some time around the summer of
2007
Q. What about Perl 6 then?
A. Perl 6 is an ongoing research project into dynamic language
techniques which takes its main
inspiration from Perl.
--
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net