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Raku / problem-solving

🦋 Problem Solving, a repo for handling problems that require review, deliberation and possibly debate
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"Perl" in the name "Perl 6" is confusing and irritating #81

Closed lizmat closed 5 years ago

lizmat commented 5 years ago

Perl 6 was initially conceived to be the next version of Perl. It took way too long to mature to an initial release. Meanwhile, people interested in taking Perl 5 along, took back the reigns and continued developing Perl 5.

Having two programming languages that are sufficiently different to not be source compatible, but only differ in what many perceive to be a version number, is hurting the image of both Perl 5 and Perl 6 in the world. Since the word "Perl" is still perceived as "Perl 5" in the world, it only seems fair that "Perl 6" changes its name.

Since Larry has indicated, in his video message to the participants of PerlCon 2019 in Riga, that the two sister languages are now old and wise enough to take care of themselves, such a name change would no longer require the approval of the BDFL.

hythm7 commented 5 years ago

I think this is the right time to fix the name issue once and for all. I like all suggested names Camelia, Raku and ofun, and if these are the only options, I hope it will be Raku due to the reasons mentioned in the comments above, particularly Raku & Rakudo looks related and complement each other.

I also want to say that I do love Camelia mascot and I hope that the name change won't affect the Camelia mascot in anyway.

DataKinds commented 5 years ago

Nothing new to add to this discussion, but my $0.02 go towards naming the language Raku. It's short, memorable, sounds similar to Rakudo, nice to say out loud, and easy to type.

patrickbkr commented 5 years ago

@AlexDaniel May I propose we phase this discussion into two separate ones:

  1. Do we rename? How? What does that mean? (the original intent of this issue)
  2. Which name?

Maybe just create a separate problem-solving issue and continue the "Which name?" discussion there. That way the discussion does not fade into a naming discussion as is happening now and we have more incentive to discuss the harder / less opinionated topics.

JJ commented 5 years ago

@patzim I don't think the intent of this issue was to start all over again the naming debate. @lizmat suggested a new name, and we can take it or leave it. If we take it, fine, if we leave it, we could start yet over again the naming debate or just continue calling it Perl 6 and have another two years of naming proposal, losing yet another window of opportunity. So I don't really think we should open two different issues. Let's accept, or not, @lizmat proposal, and then we take it from there. Just for the record, I really really really think we should accept camelia as the new name of the implementation of the language. I love it, it's original:

Also, this discussion is starting to go meta in many unexpected ways. When that happens, it's about time we start to resolve it...

patrickbkr commented 5 years ago

This post is a first try to make the idea of a rename more concrete and substantial. This helps me a lot to get a feel for what we are talking about and where the difficulties may be. This is just a first idea of what I imagine a rename could look like. Please discuss / correct as you see fit.

I'll be using the name Whatever as the imaginary new name. This is a placeholder and not intended as a proposal or implicit support of any name!

Technical

Marketing / Communication

Open questions

Do we actually want to leave the color scheme of the websites and logo unchanged? Keeping them keeps us recognizable. The rename is a good moment to change them if we want to do so.

Note: I keep extending this post.

thoughtstream commented 5 years ago

Having spent a great deal of time over the past few days reading through this discussion, and further reflecting on this whole issue, I find that:

I prefer Raku to Camelia for the following reasons:

  1. It’s shorter and more visually distinctive.

  2. It’s sounds stronger: two sharp and balanced syllables.

  3. It’s less susceptible of misspelling by English speakers.

  4. It has a clear and unique two-letter file extension: .rk
    and two plausible module extensions: .rm and .rkm

  5. It has positive linguistic associations in its native Japanese:
    comfortable and easy.

  6. It has a more subtle association with the Perl community’s signature camelids: “raku-da” is Japanese for “camel”.

  7. It also has highly appropriate cultural associations. Something raku is a made thing, a little rough around the edges, organic and taking its inspiration from nature, but elusively elegant, often revered, and always extremely serviceable.

  8. To those without the requisite cultural or linguistic knowledge, Raku is simply an easily recognized, easily pronounced, unique identifier, without (mis-)associations in most languages.

  9. Raku is already strongly publicly associated with the language, as its authorized stage name.

    1. Naming the language Raku makes the name of the Rakudo compiler project even more apposite. Especially if the interpreter executable is renamed to rakudo (by analogy to the shell command sudo, or the Vim commands :perldo, :pydo, and :rubydo).

    2. I think mascots should not be named after their languages (or, in this case, programming languages after their mascots). The Perl camel is “Amelia”, not “Perl”, after all.

    3. Both raku.com and raku.org are currently available.

    4. Raku is currently not trademarked in the relevant categories.

    5. The name Raku is unused in the programming community, unlike Camelia (which is the name of a multiplatform OCaml IDE) and Camellia (which is a symmetric key block cipher).

    6. If we as a community are to overrule Larry’s long-held and consistent preference in this fundamental matter of naming, then it seems the most respectful way to do so would be with the particular name that Larry has already selected as his preferred alternative.

To sum up my position:

PS: I also considered the suggested name Ofun at some length, and while I can appreciate how appropriate and descriptive it is within the existing community, I think it would be disadvantageous beyond the existing community. If we are trying to encourage serious programmers (and their even more sombre decision makers) to consider our language, then our descriptor should be any of:

That is is also optimized for fun is a great thing for us developers, but it’s definitely not a marketing advantage or a commercial selling point.

patrickbkr commented 5 years ago

@JJ I fully agree that the naming discussion should not happen right now. My point was that it does happen never the less and I don't see it go away. I think it hinders tackling the more difficult topics like:

Also I think currently we can't just throw a name out there and expect everyone to either approve of that name or oppose a rename. I think we either need to find consensus in some way (@domm has proposed an idea how that could look here) or find consensus that some authority (jnthn?) will get to decide (this is what @zoffixznet tried to do in his Letter to Larry).

tmtvl commented 5 years ago

Dunno if I'm allowed a vote, but in order of preference: 1: Perl 6, 2: Raku, 3: Whatever, 4: Camelia, 5: Python 4.

Ovid commented 5 years ago

Just my two cents:

As an aside, the performance of the language has now gotten to the point where it's on par with with many other dynamic languages (but not for all features). It's only going to get faster from here. It's a good time to introduce it without it seeming like a ridiculously slow or cumbersome tool.

As an aside: this would also be the time for people to be able to gently learn about the language. The Perl 6 home page has no "Tutorial" link, though it has a Getting Started link, the resulting page of which appears to also not have a "tutorial" link. In fact, introductory links appear on the Download page rather than the "getting started" page. A bit of cleanup here might help.

Something simple like "build your first web app in qr/raku|camelia|ofun/" would be nice here. I think devs often prefer that to "here's how to write a loop".

AlexDaniel commented 5 years ago

@AlexDaniel May I propose we phase this discussion into two separate ones:

  1. Do we rename? How? What does that mean? (the original intent of this issue)

  2. Which name?

How we are going to choose the name and whether we will be choosing at all will decided by @jnthn.

@jnthn, I think this comment can be a good starting point for the potential PR.

randyl commented 5 years ago

I'm a Perl 5 user who started looking into Perl 6 after brian d foy's Learning Perl 6 book was published. I think a rename would be good for the community (both 5 and 6). I prefer Camelia over Raku primarily because of pronounce-ability. When I first heard of the Raku alias, my first thought was "how do you pronounce it?". I didn't have that issue with Camelia. (FWIW, a few months ago in the U.S., there were TV commercials for the website Rakuten.com, and most of the commercials featured people trying to figure out how to pronounce the name.)

I like the power and expressiveness of Perl 6, so regardless of the name decision I'll continue to learn the language. If the name Raku is chosen, the front page of the website should indicate how to pronounce the name, and the cultural/linguistic associations described in @thoughtstream's post.

Finally, I know this is outside of our control, but it would be great if some of the existing Perl 6 books could be republished with the new name (if one is chosen). Having a physical book to study is what encouraged me to learn the language in the first place.

nige123 commented 5 years ago

Damian makes a persuasive point regarding the 'sombre decision makers' reaction to ofun .... "we're paying them that much and they're having fun!!?" I can see that could potentially hinder adoption.

I'm swaying back towards raku now.

I like that Larry chose it and it's already embedded in rakudo.

A suggestion is to use the do part like the go command in GoLang (subject to playing nicely with bash etc). It's even shorter to type and allows for different language implementations and toolkits in future:

shell> do hello.rk
shell> do run hello
shell> do test hello.rk
shell> do doc hello.rk
shell> do get https://github.com/nige123/hello

So my preferences/suggestions are:

nxadm commented 5 years ago
  • keep Perl in the description of the language - don't deny our DNA

No one is planning to rewrite history, but one of the reasons for the renaming is making a clear distinction with the historical Perl, aka Perl 5 and getting rid of the "next version" or "sister language" narrative. Each language must gain (or keep) popularity by its own merits.

Are the languages related languages? Of course. It will be stated in the history page. But describing a different language by pointing to the "previous" and "older" Perl 5? Bad idea.

  • ask the Perl Foundation to register trademarks for "raku" so the Artistic Licence 2.0 still works as intended

This isn't part of the proposal (everything would stay the same on this issue). This can be decided on its own discussion.

thoughtstream commented 5 years ago

I'm not sure that Camelia is any more intrinsically pronounceable that Raku:

And I’m not convinced that it actually matters if people pronounce Raku:

I also note that ambiguities in pronunciation don’t seem to have materially hindered the success of T<span style="text-transform:uppercase;vertical-align:-0.5ex;margin-left:-0.1667em;margin-right:-0.125em;line-height:1ex;">eX, or Kotlin, or Clojure, or Java, or Scala, or vi.

wbraswell commented 5 years ago

@thoughtstream both raku.com and raku.org have been registered for decades, at least according to whois

wbraswell commented 5 years ago

worth noting that camelia.com and camelia.org are both also already registered

thoughtstream commented 5 years ago

Thanks @wbraswell. Note, however, that I said “available”, not “unregistered”.

Both http://raku.com and http://raku.org are parked and available for purchase. As, indeed, is http://camelia.org.

http://camelia.com (as has been previously noted) is active.

leonerd commented 5 years ago

Perl 5 should just do what Java did early on when Java 1.2 was called Java 2, and so on.

Call the next major release Perl version 32, and so on.

We've been doing that for a while now ;)

$ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 28, subversion 1 (v5.28.1) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi(with 61 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
robertlemmen commented 5 years ago

perhaps it would have been good to pick a different name from the start, but that's all history now.

But changing it now is far less interesting IMHO: we trade the "Perl 5 vs Perl 6" confusion for one where we need to explain that this Camelia thing is really just a renamed Perl 6...

And, personally, I think loosing the "Perl" would be a great loss indeed, I love Perl and Perlers wether 5 or 6 or whatever!

virtualsue commented 5 years ago

Larry Wall already provided another name for Perl 6. Perl 6 doesn't need yet another name, what it needs is users and applications.

rehsack commented 5 years ago

My first reaction was to reject - since when it's a Perlish language, it should be named that way.

But - I really think Perl5 is dying, for several reasons. Legacy code will run for likely decades without making Perl5 passing away, but it's neither taught at school nor chosen for new projects (the first causes the second) - beside a handful of exceptions (/wave @Tau Station).

When common folk says "Perl" they mean "Perl5" - the ugly, the dying. It would require enormous effort to PR Perl6 is going to be "The Perl" + Perl5 must move out of the place, and I don't see this is going to be happen. @leonerd's answer speak volumes.

So Perl6 can try to revitalize the "Perl" brand and rebuild the glory ash-droplet by ash-droplet or start through going it's own way.

To choose a new name, I think the list of @nige123 requires "attracts in courses names" and alike, but thanks to shebang, the executable name is not that important (beside for REPL and quick shots - and someone has invented alias for that).

Causes the renaming of the language, that the language isn't Perlish anymore? Do we have Perl Mongers and Raku Mongers is not to distant future?

I understand that "Perl Conference" is mostly understood as "Perl 5 Conference and some tolerated Perl 6 attendees anyway". But how does "Cross compiling for Perl and Raku developers" sound? To me it sounds for two talks on two conferences.

After re-thinking past days and years, I expect also a split of communities and would like to accept this as a likely consequence. This would likely require a head like "The Raku Foundation".

robertlemmen commented 5 years ago

After re-thinking past days and years, I expect also a split of communities and would like to accept this as a likely consequence. This would likely require a head like "The Raku Foundation".

Would that not be a catastrophic outcome?

Also on the notion of "Perl 5, the ugly and dying". I love Perl 6, and I have stopped using Perl 5 pretty much entirely. But that statement would show a level of arrogance and lack of gratitude towards Perl 5 that I find hard to believe exists.

rehsack commented 5 years ago

Also on the notion of "Perl 5, the ugly and dying". I love Perl 6, and I have stopped using Perl 5 pretty much entirely. But that statement would show a level of arrogance and lack of gratitude towards Perl 5 that I find hard to believe exists.

That wasn't intended. That Perl5 is dying is hopefully not a question. And that it has an ugly history neither. Please put it in the context of what people on the street (or on a Linux Conference) get a picture in their mind when you say "Perl" to them. They don't think "Modern Perl" with strict and warnings - they think of line noise and implicit global handles etc.

shadowcat-mst commented 5 years ago

Personally, given I already consider perl5 and perl6 to be sister languages (and have done since masak originally came up with the idea and we popularised it), I consider e.g. CPAN to be the 'comprehensive perls archive network' or so and even if perl6 gets a new name, it will absolutely still be a member of the perl family of languages, and I see no reason to deny them use of the infrastructure.

Whether the camelia/rakudo/perl6/qwertyuiop community themselves will want to use the infrastructure is up to them, of course, but I've argued against perl5 people making them unwelcome before, and I'll make that argument again if I have to.

In fact, for the record, I'm happy to be asked to smack down unconstructive assholery from the perl5 side just in general over this, with the sole exception of /r/perl which I've given up on since the last moderator who actually cared about civility was driven off by Brian D Foy deciding that defending the alt-right by explaining at length to a german that "ACKSHUALLY, Nazis were left wing" was a clever idea.

(ETA: For the record, I have the receipts for that last sentence, and anybody who'd like to see them is welcome to contact me somewhere else so we don't derail this thread any more than my decision to write said sentence has already risked)

nxadm commented 5 years ago

I find the discussion of the relationship with Perl 5 and the Perl Foundation interesting and one worth having in the future.

HOWEVER, @lizmat's proposal is not touching that. It's mainly about fixing the terrible confusing name situation we have today. By adding Perl to the "new" name we pretty much perpetuate the problem (Why would I use "old" Perl when "Raku Perl" is released?<== we don't want that). The relationship with the Perl Foundation is not on the table. No changes are proposed at the moment.

robertlemmen commented 5 years ago

@rehsack Right, I assumed I misread a bit, sorry about that. But perhaps this point does kinda hint in the right direction: Perl 5 has a long a great history and has left it's mark on the world. The Perl community is equally, if not more, awesome. I do very much hope Perl 6 continues this, but it is far to early to tell.

So do we (people using Perl 6) see ourselves as a continuation of that great history, obviously with a slight inflection in trajectory? Standing on the shoulders of giants and all? Or do we see this is an entirely new and independent thing, just bogged down by legacy?

I would hope we fall into the "standing on the shoulders of giants" category. If that means we now name the language differently to avoid confusion, but proudly wave the Perl flag over it, and actively seek to stay within the Perl community, foundation etc then that is fine.

And the "people on the street": if we have something to offer they will change their mind, if we have not then no name-changing will help. People just love bashing other languages, it's like football!

rehsack commented 5 years ago

I remember comments like

I do not intend to go to any future conference with just Perl in it's name since it is assumed being Perl5 only.

These comments in mind (and they came from very different directions), I only warn about the consequences of having split to hard.

On the other hand, when it's not hard enough - we waste a lot of effort with finally no reasonable effect.

So, what do we want at all?

ghost commented 5 years ago

Quoting @pistacchio:

I strongly feel like both the name “Camelia” and the Camelia logo need to go away, because nobody wants to invest its time in something he perceives as a “joke language” and nobody would ever choose a language because it’s “gentle”.

As a similarly interested outsider, albeit a Perl 5 using one, I'm nodding with agreement. I have nothing against the branding personally as my appreciation of Perl 5 - along with a degree of faith in the efforts of Larry Wall and his entourage - exclusively informs my interest in Perl 6. Still, the outside world can be an uncharitable place. In addition to some of the other concerns that have been raised, I cannot realistically see how such a change would do anything but bolster its potential perception as a 'meme' language. Likewise for ofun; while born of a commendable sentiment, I think that it comes across as possessing a degree of levity that is highly unlikely to appeal to all.

While I would very much like for both languages to thrive, the tensions that have arisen over the naming topic have been a tremendous turn off, in my estimation. The situation has gone so far as to damage how I feel about continuing to use Perl 5 for my work. I agree with the comment that this comes across as a "scapegoat" issue. I have never found it confusing or annoying that Perl 6 is called Perl 6. As concerns the marketplace of languages, I think the notion that the fate of Perl 5 hinges in any way upon the name of Perl 6 is a bit of a stretch. As for Perl 6 itself, perhaps a re-branding exercise would lead to further adoption and perhaps it would not. It is not something to be taken lightly. If such an exercise is deemed to be necessary, I would suggest involving an external focus group of some kind, if it can be afforded.

P.S. While it didn't strike any chord with me, I think that Raku has been the most marketable name of those that have been proposed so far.

sjn commented 5 years ago

FWIW, here are my 2 cents.

  1. I'm positive for a name change
  2. Of the suggestions on the table this time, I'm happy to support "Camelia".
  3. While "Raku" is a good name, it is NOT a "unique" name. Raku is heavily used when talking about pottery and traditional Japanese earthenware. Can we please hear from someone in Japan if this can pose a problem in the Japanese Perl communities?
  4. Furthermore, any names to be considered should be checked if they have some unfortunate meaning in different languages/countries (as Damian mentiond). This is especially important since the Perl 6 devs has gone to extraordinary lengths to support different languages through it's excellent Unicode support. Let's not throw away one of the greatest strengths of Perl 6 by chosing a name with an unfortunate meaning in India, Indonesia or China or any of the other populous non-English speaking countries. (A side-note here; The next release of the Perl 6 language, 6.e, will be named after a holiday starting with E, and if "Eid al-Fitr" or just "Eid" is chosen, we'd do very well to pick a name that sounds well in the most common languages spoken in the countries where this holiday is a tradition.)

And a final question. Who's voting on this decision (if anyone) and who has any mandate to make this decision final, so we can be done with this topic?

ab5tract commented 5 years ago

Perl 5 should just do what Java did early on when Java 1.2 was called Java 2, and so on. Call the next major release Perl version 32, and so on.

We've been doing that for a while now ;)

$ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 28, subversion 1 (v5.28.1) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi(with 61 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

The existence of a clear, pre-existing version upgrade (numbering) path for /usr/bin/perl after Perl 6 decamps seals the deal for me.

jnthn commented 5 years ago

First of all, thanks to everyone who has shared their ideas and insights on this issue so far. I'm especially glad that the discussion here has been constructive and good-natured.

As @AlexDaniel noted at the start of the issue, the topic comes under the "language" label, and so it falls to me to try and shepherd things through to a useful outcome. That outcome will be delivered in the form of a PR to this repository, which will then need to be approved, or have changes requested, by the reviewers. Assuming it is approved and merged, the changes it proposes would then be implemented.

That nicely brings me to the next point: the PR needs to indicate some concrete steps that would happen next, assuming it passes review. I don't want a repeat of the "Raku as an alias" situation, where it was clear there was an alias, but not anything like enough guidance - or chance to build agreement among key contributors - about what implementing the use of it would look like.

Thus, the PR should at least:

  1. Propose a new name, denoted * in the following points (no, * is not a naming proposal, it's just a placeholder! :-))
  2. Propose a framing for the relationship between * and the Perl language family, so we can try to have it consistently described.
  3. Suggest how we can frame a * presence at Perl conferences. It was clear to me from discussions I had at PerlCon that many folks who might be primarily associated with Perl 5 and Perl 6 do want to continue to see each other and learn about things each other are working on at such events. Some folks are, of course, quite involved with both languages.
  4. Identify things that would be updated to instead mention * in the near term (scale of days to weeks) following a rename (website? docs?), and how we'd go about that.
  5. Propose how we would announce the change. For example, imagine somebody goes to perl6.org, and is redirected to *.org. At least for a while, it'd be good to have something there - probably a pre-agreed article/press-release/whatever. Are there similar situations that need caring about?

If we do go ahead with a rename, it will inevitably be a long-running process, with issues like "what about file extensions", "what about editor support", "what about the command that distributions install", etc. I don't think we need to worry about every last detail of these (and many other) issues ahead of approving a rename, though some reviewers may - like my list above - have things they feel really important to have some clarity/detail on before approving.

Even for those things we are collectively fine deciding to defer, it's still worth enumerating them as "things we'll open an issue here about if the PR is approved". It means we won't forget them, and enumerating them will also help us to understand the consequences of a rename, which I think is important.

While "which name" is, of course, an important decision, the majority of the content of such a PR will likely be about the same. Further, seeing a proposed new name in context may help us to get a better feel for the options. At this point, I think the realistic contenders are (alphabetically sorted) Camelia and Raku. I find it fairly unlikely that there's going to be a new option emerging that - especially with no prior usage - still manages to win over a larger mind share among reviewers.

Getting the PR started would be a good next step. I don't mind who does start the drafting; if folks prefer it be me, it can be (though probably not for another few days), but if somebody else wants to stub it and try to collect positions so far or provide proposed wording, that's fine too.

Leont commented 5 years ago

I have always found Perl6's relationship to be hard to explain to outsiders, and (sadly) prejudice against the Perl brand doesn't exactly help. As such, I think a rename would be for the better.

I don't have very strong opinions on Raku over Camelia, but I prefer the former for the reasons @ @thoughtstream mentioned (ofun is terrible in every way though).

pjscott commented 5 years ago

Let me start by saying that I am excited at the possibility of a name change. I have not been able to justify much professional involvement (let alone public training) in Perl for several years and I hope this may (in time) change that.

In the business (corporate, government) circles that I inhabit all mention of Perl long ago ceased except for legacy scripts that get rewritten in Python whenever funding becomes available. It has been years since I dared suggest Perl for new development and the reaction then was laughter; now it would be damaging to my career. Understand that while this is an unjustified perception (and largely based on Perl 4 exposure), it simply will not change in response to any logical argument. It is a reflex that triggers upon hearing the syllable "Perl..."

This is a cross that Perl 5 has to bear; it need not be borne by Perl 6.

Perl 6 deserves better. It is the greatest innovation in computer languages I have ever seen. Whilst its development stands on the shoulders of giants, it gains no cachet in its public perception from the Perl name and instead is mired in negative associations.

A language this revolutionary deserves a unique name. That it has more in common with Perl 5 than any other language does not change that.

There is also a substantial benefit in public perception from a name that doesn't contain the Perl syllable, which is that a sizeable community is always hungry for the next new thing. And Perl 6 is radically new. The OSCON I attended last month paraded an alphabet soup of new technologies that are midgets next to our language but they got attention and we didn't. I know we have more to offer than the flavor-of-the-month, but being shiny can get us the boost we need and deserve.

I make these observations reluctantly, because the name of Perl served me personally very well for years. But everything I said, I find incontrovertible.

I favor raku because of brevity and communicability: I would not often be asked to spell it in conversation. But if the use of a domain name will tilt the decision, I recommend finding out ASAP what the cost for the .com or .org would be.

rba commented 5 years ago

I agree with the voices here, that it's time to rename Perl 6.

When I first heard about the mascots name Camelia, I had bad feelings as the only other thing I knew with this name where articles for women hygiene. (See http://www.camelia.com/)

The mascot itself looks very childish. I've asked Larry and indeed this was his primary intention. To attract younger persons, teenagers, with this mascot design. The plush version of Camelia though found as well the way in the children room and my younger daughter liked her as much to even bring her to the holidays we have now.

In the meantime I got used to the mascot and it lost my attention. So, my current feelings are neutral now, regarding the name, ok, and the design I accepted.

I'm mostly with @thoughtstream and I have a

And I don't see that it will be any other option, than the two, based on the state of the current discussion.

I will continue to use and support both languages. Currently Perl 5 feeds my children, as there is plenty of code still around. And Perl 6 is my preference for my next project.

I've learned that most companies have no clue which languages the programmers are using, beside what the architects tried to push through. In the wild there are far more programming languages in use then what is on the preferred list.

For a new developer having the chance to get a fresh unbiased view of Perl 6 as modern language must be our primary intention.

kentfredric commented 5 years ago

I favor raku because of brevity and communicability: I would not often be asked to spell it in conversation. But if the use of a domain name will tilt the decision, I recommend finding out ASAP what the cost for the .com or .org would be.

And that's easily fixable by other means.

rust-lang.org ruby-lang.org r-project.org

Assuming "raku" was chosen, I see no deficit from having the domain "raku-lang.org", and if anything, adds potential disambiguative power and semantic conveyance.

kentfredric commented 5 years ago

The mascot itself looks very childish. I've asked Larry and indeed this was his primary intention. To attract younger persons, teenagers, with this mascot design. The plush version of Camelia though found as well the way in the children room and my younger daughter liked her as much to even bring her to the holidays we have now.

When this Issue was raised, I was more favourable to Camelia, but I suspect that's my anglo-centrism playing up.

As the issue has progressed, "raku" has indeed grown on me, and I have a suggestion that might find sympathetic ears:

1nickt commented 5 years ago

But - I really think Perl5 is dying, for several reasons. Legacy code will run for likely decades without making Perl5 passing away, but it's neither taught at school nor chosen for new projects (the first causes the second) - beside a handful of exceptions (/wave @tau Station).

Mr. Rehsack you are so wrong about this and it makes me sad that you of all people would say it. At the very large public company I work for, sure, more new projects are started in other languages combined than in Perl, but that's also true of the projects started in Node, Java, or anything else! And the core architecture of my company, and the last one I worked for (2nd largest HR company in the world) was all Perl. Come on, no one can bust out APIs like a Perl developer!

Many of us who have been around for a long time remember when Perl was kicking ass, and now that it's one among many and not usually the most "popular" with the hip kids, some of us conclude "Perl is dying" but that is a logical fallacy. I bet ya dollars to donuts that Perl runs an order of magnitude more websites now than in 1998 -- how is that dying?

I understand that "Perl Conference" is mostly understood as "Perl 5 Conference and some tolerated Perl 6 attendees anyway".

Wat? We can't wait to get our Perl conferences back!

lizmat commented 5 years ago

After reading the remarks by @thoughtstream , I decided to not make the same mistake as Larry did many years ago: I will accept Damian's strong suggestion to use "raku" and would hereby renounce my own suggestion for "Camelia". I will now start to draft a PR on which can be voted. This may take until tomorrow.

virtualsue commented 5 years ago

Is a PR really necessary? Larry Wall chose this name (raku) last year.

AlexDaniel commented 5 years ago

Is a PR really necessary? Larry Wall chose this name (raku) last year.

Absolutely, yes.

jnthn commented 5 years ago

Is a PR really necessary?

Yes, because:

  1. That's the process we've been establishing for problem-solving.
  2. As I indicated yesterday, there's much more to do than "choose the name".
pudge commented 5 years ago

In fact, for the record, I'm happy to be asked to smack down unconstructive assholery from the perl5 side just in general over this, with the sole exception of /r/perl which I've given up on since the last moderator who actually cared about civility was driven off by Brian D Foy deciding that defending the alt-right by explaining at length to a german that "ACKSHUALLY, Nazis were left wing" was a clever idea.

No one chose you — of all people — to be the “unconstructive assholery” police, despite your unsurpassed expertise in the area. You are lying about what happened, and it is irrelevant to the discussion; why you chose to even bring it up here is anyone’s guess.

nxadm commented 5 years ago

@shadowcat-mst @pudge Can we keep this discussion not related to the renaming out of this thread? Most people miss the context about "what happened" anyway, so discussing it here is moot. Thanks for understanding.

shadowcat-mst commented 5 years ago

@1nickt If you think that "getting our conferences back" would be a net win, you're seriously underestimating the advantages that cross-community pollination has had. Check your dependency chain on a few apps maybe, and consider what life would be like without any code available that depends on Moose, Moo, Role::Tiny, Type::Tiny, or the perl keyword API.

I much prefer the world where I get to use all of those, and if you do too, you should reconsider your position, because without the shared conferences and community you wouldn't have any of these things.

nxadm commented 5 years ago

@1nickt Much like the relationship with the Perl Foundation is not included in the proposal, the decision to split or continue to have "combined" conferences is not on the table at the moment. (Furthermore, no committee or BDFL will stop you or someone else if you want to organise a conf exclusively centered on something, eg. Perl 5, Perl 6, Mojolicious or Cro.)

pudge commented 5 years ago

I was a member of p5p, and in the meeting when Perl 6 was announced (not the mug-throwing meeting, the next one), just over 19 years ago.

I’ve been saying for probably 18 years that Perl 6 should change its name, for essentially the same reasons @lizmat listed here. I gave up trying to convince people maybe 10 years ago. 😆

I have nothing at all against Perl 6, and nothing against sharing CPAN, and conferences, and anything else. My only problem is, and has always been, the confusion created by the name. From where I sit, it is a lot later than I would have liked, but I still think a name change is the best path forward.

I do not get a vote, and would not want one, but I approve of a change, whatever the Perl 6 folks think it should be … as long as it is not “Perl $N”. 👍

Plato commented 5 years ago

There is much more to do than choosing the name, but there is even a lot more to do than preparing related materials and announcements, etc. too. The marketing side of things is important, and if we want to be effective it behooves us to take a methodical approach. As programmers, we’ve surely all complained about not getting proper specs for a project. But I have not seen anyone offer a precise definition of the problem to be solved, or explain how exactly the proposed solution will fix it, or how to tell whether it has succeeded or not.

I understand the issue in vague, hand-waving terms, but how will changing the name put two decades of toothpaste back in the tube? Is it just going to replace one set of problems with another? Does anyone have any actual data on how many people like or dislike X because of reason Y? And so on.

The PR aspects should not be divorced from the other issues either. As AJS pointed out, a new name is a big deal — or should be, if it’s handled properly. This is an opportunity to get attention for P6^WRaku^W*, and we want it to be good attention, not bad. It’s the sort of thing that would typically go along with, say, an official “v1.0” release, something significantly positive. Otherwise it’s likely that it won’t have much of a worthwhile effect, or even will have a downright negative effect.

jubilatious1 commented 5 years ago

Hello @lizmat and others, since it seems inevitable that Perl 6 will undergo a name-change, here are two name suggestions:

NUPERL:

www.nuperl.org www.nuperl.com www.nuperl.net

NEUPERL:

www.neuperl.org www.neuperl.com www.neuperl.net

One might imagine the prefix "nu" is a shortened form of "numerical", but it could also harken back to the Old English "nu" meaning "now". (Okay, it could also stand for "nuclear" or "nucleus", suggesting the "Nuperl" language acts like a cellular nucleus to direct and control cellular processes).

One might imagine the prefix "neu" is a shortened form of "neural" or "neuronal", but it could also harken back to the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to shout." Neural/neuronal meanings could be appropriate if the "Neuperl" language were to be employed in AI / ML. (Okay, "neu" could also be a shortened form of "neutral", but I digress... ).

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=*nu- https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=*neu-

One name could be chosen, or both. The extra "e" in "Neuperl" could mean a bleeding-edge "experimental" -dev branch relative to "Nuperl". Or Nuperl/Neuperl could replace Perl6/PDL, respectively.

I have it on reliable authority that some or all of these domains can be donated to the (non-profit) Perl 6 cause, presuming a decision can be reached in a reasonable amount of time. The bigger fear would seem to be a rush to judgement. There certainly is time to 1). gather together multiple Perl 6 name suggestions, and to 2). hold one or more Doodle polls--before making a final decision.

Was that "NP" complete enough? Best Regards.

https://beta.doodle.com/free-poll

Juerd commented 5 years ago

Hello @lizmat and others, since it seems inevitable that Perl 6 will undergo a name-change, here are two name suggestions: nuperl / neuperl

Type check failed in assignment to $name; expected <anon> but got Str.

These suggestions miss the point that having "perl" in the name is confusing and irritating, per the title of this issue. The point is, specifically, to choose our $name where not /:i perl/, and both "nuperl" and "neuperl" cannot pass that test.

jubilatious1 commented 5 years ago

These suggestions miss the point that having "perl" in the name is confusing and irritating, per the title of this issue. The point is, specifically, to choose our $name where not /:i perl/, and both "nuperl" and "neuperl" cannot pass that test.

"Question and Answer with Larry Wall" (Moderated by R. Geoffrey Avery) The Perl Conference 2018 | Salt Lake City https://youtu.be/_wJNPOs-Q20?t=2636

Q. [R. Geoffrey Avery, 43:56] "And a slightly more serious question: Perl 5 and Perl 6 as names, why didn't you pick something different?"

A. [Larry Wall, 44:07] "Because I wanted to go to a 'Perl' conference...I didn't want to go to a 'Perl and something else' conference. You guys are Perl people--all of you." (applause).

Continuing, Larry Wall goes on to refer to then-current issues surrounding 'Perl 5 / Perl 6 naming' as "a red herring."

Regardless, it seems that Larry Wall wasn't healthy enough to travel to the recent conference in Riga. You want to rename the language he (and others) have been working on for over 15 years now, based on a short (3.5 minute) video greeting message he sent--wherein he admits he isn't in the best of health?

Why now? Why not (for example), Christmas Day 2020?