<story><title>Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-renamed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkozlows</author><text>To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been:&lt;p&gt;1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)&lt;p&gt;2. The coyness around whether it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; or not. Right now today, as someone who has paid attention to Perl 6 and even written some toy code with it, I do not understand its release status at all. That&amp;#x27;s absurd.&lt;p&gt;3. The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they&amp;#x27;re different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they&amp;#x27;re called &amp;quot;javac&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jvm.&amp;quot; This wifty &amp;quot;no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you&amp;#x27;re running is Rakudo and Parrot&amp;quot; distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.&lt;p&gt;4. In a distant, distant last place: any actual functional stuff about the language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>simcop2387</author><text>&amp;gt; 3. The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they&amp;#x27;re different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they&amp;#x27;re called &amp;quot;javac&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jvm.&amp;quot; This wifty &amp;quot;no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you&amp;#x27;re running is Rakudo and Parrot&amp;quot; distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.&lt;p&gt;Pedantically, and this also helps serve your point, Parrot isn&amp;#x27;t used by any modern Perl 6 implementation, it&amp;#x27;s effectively dead (if not totally).  MoarVM is the less ambitious (not trying to support every dynamic language like Parrot was) and more mature VM that is in use now.&lt;p&gt;And the requisite, ParrotVM is just pining for the fjords joke goes here.  It has ceased to be, gone to meet it&amp;#x27;s maker, it is an Ex-Parrot.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: For reference, Parrot VM really was named because of that sketch.  It started as an April Fools joke and kinda stuck.  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20100718195724&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.perl.com&amp;#x2F;pub&amp;#x2F;a&amp;#x2F;2001&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;parrot.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;web.archive.org&amp;#x2F;web&amp;#x2F;20100718195724&amp;#x2F;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.perl.c...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?</title><url>http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-renamed.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mkozlows</author><text>To my mind, the blockers for Perl 6 adoption in order of importance have been:&lt;p&gt;1. The name, saddling it with the legacy of Perl. (I say this as someone who really liked working with Perl back in the waning years of the old millennium, and believes that Perl was visionary in pointing the way to the state of modern programming... but also that it had some limitations that have only become more glaring over the years.)&lt;p&gt;2. The coyness around whether it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; or not. Right now today, as someone who has paid attention to Perl 6 and even written some toy code with it, I do not understand its release status at all. That&amp;#x27;s absurd.&lt;p&gt;3. The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they&amp;#x27;re different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they&amp;#x27;re called &amp;quot;javac&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jvm.&amp;quot; This wifty &amp;quot;no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you&amp;#x27;re running is Rakudo and Parrot&amp;quot; distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.&lt;p&gt;4. In a distant, distant last place: any actual functional stuff about the language.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kbenson</author><text>&amp;gt; The insistence on branding sub-components of it and exposing that branding. Yes, it has a VM. Yes, it has a compiler. But why do people talk about ParrotVM and Rakudo as if they&amp;#x27;re different things? Java has a compiler and a VM, they&amp;#x27;re called &amp;quot;javac&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;jvm.&amp;quot; This wifty &amp;quot;no, Perl 6 is the standard, the software you&amp;#x27;re running is Rakudo and Parrot&amp;quot; distinction is totally irrelevant to anyone actually wanting to write code, and weirdly confusing.&lt;p&gt;The reason the implementation is named (Rakudo), is because there&amp;#x27;s a spec, and originally there were a few people making implementations.  There was good effort from individuals on C and C# versions that were more monolithic, and Rakudo was where most the community work went since it was designed in a way to be more cross platform (it&amp;#x27;s mostly implemented in the minimal NQP languages, which is &amp;quot;not-quite perl&amp;quot;.  It&amp;#x27;s a much easier thing to port to a VM, and then you get like 90% of the language features already designed and working).&lt;p&gt;The reason the VM is noted is because it changed a couple of times.  Bringing the VM name into it lets people know that if it&amp;#x27;s different, maybe it will have fixed their main performance complaints.  To my knowledge, they haven&amp;#x27;t used parrot in a decade or so, and there&amp;#x27;s actually some bad blood between the VM and Perl 6&amp;#x2F;Rakudo (which had different teams, another reason to brand with both.&lt;p&gt;So, Perl 6 is the standard.  There have been multiple implementations to varying degrees of completeness, including but not limited to Rakudo, Pugs, and Niecza.  Those implementations have generally targeted one or more VM targets, including Parrot, MoarVM, Java, .Net and custom VMs.&lt;p&gt;It may or may not have hurt adoption seeing this terminology, but it was there for a reason, because it denoted very large important aspects of what was going on behind the scenes, and in some cases doing otherwise could have worked against some relationships that were going on between projects.</text></comment>