Larry Wall, creator of the Perl language and the "benevolent dictator for life" of the project, approved the renaming of Perl 6 to Raku, putting an end to the debates about the name change. The name Raku was chosen as a derivative of Rakudo, the name of the Perl 6 compiler. It is already familiar to developers and does not overlap with other projects in search engines.
In his comment, Larry quoted «No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise, the new patch tears away from the old, and the worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wine skins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and the wine is spilled, and the skins will be ruined; but new wine must be put into fresh wine skins; and both are preserved.», but he omitted the ending «And no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, 'The old is better.'»
Let us recall that the renaming of Perl 6 has been actively in the community since early August. The main reason for the reluctance to continue the development of the project under the name Perl 6 is the fact that Perl 6 did not become a continuation of Perl 5, as was initially expected, but a separate programming language, for which no tools for transparent migration from Perl 5 have been prepared.
As a result, there is a situation where the name Perl refers to two parallel evolving independent languages that are not compatible with each other at the source code level and have their own developer communities. Using one name for related but fundamentally different languages leads to confusion, and many users continue to consider Perl 6 a new version of Perl, rather than a fundamentally different language. Meanwhile, the name Perl continues to be associated with Perl 5, and mentioning Perl 6 requires additional clarification.
Sursa: opennet.ro
