The Raku Programming Language Collect, Conserve and Remaster Project
Originally published on 3 June 2013 by Patrick Michaud.
[This is a response to the Russian Perl Podcast transcribed by Peter Rabbitson and discussed at blogs.perl.org.]
I found this translation and podcast to be interesting and useful, thanks to all who put it together.
Since there seems to have been some disappointment that Raku developers didn’t join in the discussions about “Perl 7” earlier this year, and in the podcast I’m specifically mentioned by name, I thought I’d go ahead and comment now and try to improve the record a bit.
While I can’t speak for the other Raku developers, in my case I didn’t contribute to the discussion because nearly all the things I would’ve said were already being said better by others such as Larry, rjbs, mst, chromatic, etc. I think a “Perl 7” rebrand is the wrong approach, for exactly the reasons they give.
A couple of statements in the podcast refer to “hurting the feelings of Raku developers” as being a problem resulting from a rebrand to Perl 7. I greatly appreciate that people are concerned with the possible impact of a Perl rebrand on Raku developers and our progress. I believe that Raku’s success or failure at this point will have little to do with the fact that “6 is larger than 5”. I don’t find the basic notion of “Perl 7” offensive or directly threatening to Raku.
But I fully agree with mst that “you can’t … have two successive numbers in two brands and not expect people to be confused.” We already have problems explaining “5” and “6” — adding more small integers to the explanation would just make an existing problem even worse, and wouldn’t do anything to address the fundamental problems Raku was intended to resolve.
Since respected voices in the community were already saying the things I thought about the name “Perl 7”, I felt that adding my voice to that chorus could only be more distracting than helpful to the discussion. My involvement would inject speculations on the motivations of Raku developers into what is properly a discussion about how to promote progress with Perl. I suspect that other Raku developers independently arrived at similar conclusions and kept silent as well (Larry being a notable exception).
I’d also like to remark on a couple of @sharifulin’s comments in the podcast (acknowledging that the transcribed comments may be imprecise in the translation from Russian):
First, I’m absolutely not the “sole developer” of Raku (13:23 in the podcast), or even the sole developer of Rakudo Raku. Frankly I think it’s hugely disrespectful to so flippantly ignore the contributions of others in the Raku development community. Let’s put some actual facts into this discussion… in the past twelve months there have been over 6,500 commits from over 70 committers to the various Raku related repositories (excluding module repositories), less than 4% (218) of those commits are from me. Take a look at the author lists from the Raku commit logs and you may be a little surprised at some of the people you find listed there.
Second, there is not any sense in which I think that clicking “Like” on a Facebook posting could be considered “admitting defeat” (13:39 in the podcast). For one, my “Like” was actually liking rjbs’ reply to mst’s proposal, as correctly noted in the footnotes (thanks Peter!).
But more importantly, I just don’t believe that Perl and Raku are in a battle that requires there to be a conquerer, a vanquished, or an admission of defeat.