

What to say to "Perl 6 isn't Perl any more" - prog
http://perlbuzz.com/2010/08/what-to-say-to-perl-6-isnt-perl-any-more.html

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tzs
That's a strange article. He's upset at "cranks" saying that Perl 6 isn't Perl
anymore. His argument seems to rest on two things:

1\. There were a lot of changes from Perl 4 to Perl 5, and people didn't say
that wasn't Perl any more. So, a lot of change from 5 to 6 is the same.

2\. Larry says it is Perl.

The second argument works, at least--Larry is the one with the naming rights.

However, the author states this:

    
    
        There are those who will read this and say "Yeah, but Perl
        5 could still pretty much run any Perl 4 program, but
        Perl 6 won't be able to run Perl 5." And that's true.
    

That seems to me to be a pretty fundamental difference between the 4 to 5 step
and the 5 to 6 step. With 4 to 5, essentially a bunch of new features became
available, and you could start adding them incrementally to your existing
programs.

It sounds like 5 to 6 is, practically, from the programmer's point of view, no
different than a transition from Perl to Ruby, or Perl to Python, etc.. That
is, it involves learning a new language (and if Perl 6 won't run Perl 5 code
than it _IS_ a new language, despite having the same name), and writing new
code for it or porting old code.

~~~
chromatic
If you think of a language as merely a bag of syntax, than Perl 5 and Perl 6
are very different. (You can make the same argument about a lot of versions of
a lot of languages.)

If you think of a language as a design philosophy expressed in semantics and
syntax -- and a guide to choosing to make the corresponding tradeoffs -- then
the "The syntax is very different, thus it's a different language!" argument
doesn't work.

Various implementations of Lisps and Schemes are recognizable as Lisps and
Schemes for a reason.

