[perlgeek]

> That is great for you as a Perl 6 developer that gets extra attention for the new language by leveraging the Perl brand, but it is absolutely awful for people in the Perl 5 community. Perl 6 gets free press, but Perl 5 gets mocked and public opinion turns even further against it.

First of all, the press for Perl 6 isn't free at all. We get press because we do cool stuff with programming languages. So do the Rust and Nim communities, for example. Please don't downplay our effort. And the comments are full of prejudice against Perl 6 that is rooted in its Perl 5 legacy; so it's not "free" in a second dimension.

Second, in my experience, Perl 6 is only a small part of the ridicule. Mostly it's about Perl being aweful to read (for which Perl 6 bears no blame at all), lousy code quality, unfamiliar looks through sigils, and so on.

> You refer to "unsolved problems" and while I'm sure there are from your perspective, from mine as someone who writes large Perl 5 applications, there are no great issues

Have you ever asked yourself if this is actually true? Would your work be much easier if you had sane threading in some scenarios? Subroutine and method signatures? never had to deal with the bloat that comes from different libraries using different object systems?

I also happen to work on big Perl 5 code bases for money, and with the knowledge of what's possible in a perlish language, I regularly identify pain points that in the end are rooted in missing or deficient language features.

[DougHaber]

Sorry if anything has come off as being too argumentative. I just feel like you are downplaying the large impact that Perl 6 has had on Perl 5 and the public perception of Perl, and the impact that will come when a 1.0 version is officially released. With the new release coming up this may be the last opportunity to avoid the future damage, and that is what my question revolves around. As for everything else, we are really on the same side and I agree with you on the notable points, so I will leave out further discussion.

I am looking forward to the future of Perl 6. I really do like some of the things I've seen going on there, and it is fairly likely that in the future I will be happily writing Perl 6 code on some projects. With that said, I am very concerned about how Perl 6 carrying the Perl name will impact Perl 5, but that is separate from my excitement that a new more modern language will be carrying forward some of the Perl styles.

In short, I do appreciate Perl 6 and I don't mean to downplay anything going on there, but my concern is about what it all means for Perl 5.