“Larry Wall and other active Perl porters and Perl helpers met
on Tuesday afternoon at Perl Conference 4.0 and mapped out a what
is planned to become a complete rewrite of Perl that will become
Perl 6 in 18 to 24 months, with a prerelease targeted for next
year’s conference.”
“Perl 5 will not be abandoned, but will primarily be
concerned with bugfixes both major and minor.“
“The meeting for members of the perl5-porters mailing list was
the result of an earlier, smaller meeting of Wall, Nathan
Torkington, Chip Salzenberg, and others who basically decided that
Perl needed to be fixed in certain ways, and that a rewrite was the
best way to do it. Salzenberg started the Topaz project two years
ago, to reimplement Perl in C++. Though Topaz itself will not be
the basis for Perl 6, Salzenberg noted that the lessons learned in
the experience will be very helpful to the new effort.”
“Torkington led the three-hour meeting, starting off by saying
what was wrong with Perl. Much of the focus on the problems with
Perl centered around how increasingly difficult it was to improve,
extend, and embed Perl. A rewrite and redesign are needed, he said,
and maybe it is time for a hard change. So while the focus of the
effort seems to be on improving the Perl guts and API, the project
will also be used as an opportunity to clean out some of the cruft,
including bad and seldom-used features.”