Python 2/3 versus Perl 5/6

[Steven D'Aprano]

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