Comment by librasteve
21 hours ago
The main idea of renaming from Perl6 to Raku was to allow this beautiful and seductive new language to escape the black hole gravity well formed by the collapse of the Perl star. Seems like Raku is stuck inside the Perl event horizon for ever, with no hope of reputational escape.
I think it was based on the misconception that the mainstream turned away from Perl because of a handful of warts and mistakes, not because Perl's unconstrained flexibility made it impractical, and that Perl "done right" could recapture the excitement and mainstream attention that Perl once enjoyed. I think they should have accepted that the existing community was already the largest subset of programmers that could embrace Perl's trade-offs, with or without the historical warts.
fwiw I think Perl was so popular in the late 90s that a transition like Python2.0 to 3.0 that traded some backward compatibility for some structure COULD have been successful. However, the Perl community also got tired of waiting such a long time for what is now Raku, and it was so different with no incremental migration path, that the lifeboat never materialized. Its not like Larry and the community didn't know that a transition was needed, but the execution was not there.
Great analogy, and similar to how I saw things play out.
IIRC Perl 6 wanted to expand or morph into something better, spent a ton of time on it, and the community in general rejected it hard.
So now we have this dangling language that's shunned by its own community, regardless of its merits. Weird place to be in.
lol
Well Raku is not shunned by the very warm and welcoming Raku Community … https://raku.org/community