gistfile1.txt

[This is a response to the podcast transcribed at 
 https://gist.github.com/ribasushi/5670006#Footnotes ]

I found this translation and podcast to be really interesting, thanks
to all who put it together.

Since there seems to be some disappointment that Perl 6 developers
didn't join in the discussion about "Perl 7", and I'm mentioned by
name specifically, 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 Perl 6 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 points in the podcast refer to "hurting the feelings 
of Perl 6 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 5 rebrand on Perl 6 developers and
our progress.  But I believe that Perl 6's success or failure at 
this point will have little to do with the fact that "6 is larger 
than 5", so I don't find the basic notion of "Perl 7" offensive 
or threatening to Perl 6.

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 Perl 6 was intended to resolve.

Since respected voices in the community were already saying the
things I thought about '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 Perl 6 developers into what is properly a 
discussion about how to promote progress with Perl 5.  I suspect 
that other Perl 6 developers independently arrived at similar 
conclusions and kept silent as well (Larry being a notable exception).

I'd also like to respond to a couple of @sharifulin's comments 
in the podcast (acknowledging that the transcribed comments may
be colored by the translation from Russian):

First, I'm absolutely not the "sole developer" of Perl 6 (13:23 in
the podcast), or even the sole developer of Rakudo Perl 6, and 
I frankly think it's hugely disrespectful to so flippantly ignore
the contributions of others in the Perl 6 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 Perl 6 related repositories (excluding 
module repositories), less than 4% (218) of those commits are from 
me.  Take a look at the author lists from the Perl 6 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 5 and 
Perl 6 are in a battle that requires there to be a conquerer,
a vanguished, or an admission of defeat.  

Pm