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As you'll hear from any advocate, Perl 6 is fundamentally a new language, not just a new version of Perl 5; but, even if you want to think of it as a new version of Perl 5, then it's hardly true that Perl 5 has been dormant all this time. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#2000.E2.80.93present , for example.



I just don't see why that means people will use it. That's probably a negative, don't you think? The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

I'm glad it's finished and all, but this has just seemed like a slow-moving disaster to me.


> I just don't see why that means people will use it.

I wasn't arguing for or against that position, just responding to the claim that it (Perl 6) was a new version of a language that had been dormant for 15 years. In fact I don't know what to expect for Perl 6; as an old lover of Perl 5, who hasn't done any Perl programming for a while, I would love to see a modern successor, but I'm not sure that I totally disagree with the people who think that the name now has too many possibly negative connotations.

> The people who have been writing Perl have to learn a new language, and people who haven't been using Perl have so many others to choose from already.

The same is true for any new language, though, whether or not it has 'Perl' in its name, and some of them do get adopted!




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