The famous Perl coder Allison Randal writes about why Perl is not dead (it's just pining for the fjords *wink* ) and contrasts the Perl 5/6 split to Python 2/3:
[quote] The single biggest thing we didn’t anticipate is that the “community rewrite of Perl” has, in fact, turned out to be a community fork. Perl 6 is not like Python 3, which really is a continuation of Python 2, with the same developers, same users, and same community values. (Sometime I’ll write about my interest and contributions toward the Python 3 migration effort, with its own unique successes and challenges.) What grew out of the Perl 6 idea is a new community, a new group of developers, and even a new identity, “Rakudo” rather than Perl (with a phase of “Pugs” along the way). The core Perl developers still work on Perl 5, and have little or no interest in Rakudo. Some of the Rakudo developers have a background in Perl, but many of them have a background in PHP, Java, C#, or other languages. Rakudo is not an “upgrade” from Perl. It’s revolutionary and exciting, just like Perl was in 1987, but it is not Perl. Please note that I’m not commenting on the similarity or difference of syntax between Perl and Rakudo. If you take a long view over the history of programming languages, syntax is about as relevant to the success of a language as the color of the bike shed. And if you really, really get down to the nuts and bolts, the syntax and functionality of Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Lua are all fundamentally quite similar. That doesn’t make them the same language, and more importantly it doesn’t make them the same community. [end quote] Read the rest here: http://allisonrandal.com/2013/03/31/mythbusters-why-i-still-love-perl/ By the way, although Allison is not active here, she is an active Python programmer and member of the PSF, that's the Python Software Foundation, not the PSU, the Python Secret Underground, which most definitely does not exist. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
