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O'Reilly Network Weekly
Open Source Roundtable
Sponsored by IBM developerWorks

What will be in Perl 6?
July 28, 2000

At O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in Monterey earlier this month, Perl creator Larry Wall announced the start of work on Perl 6, a complete rewrite of the language to address many of the social and technical problems in Perl 5. This week, O'Reilly Network Publisher Dale Dougherty talks with Perl.com managing editor Mark-Jason Dominus and Perl Mongers director brian d foy about the announcement, its meaning, and the reaction of the Perl community.

Listen to this discussion (18:52 mins, 17.7 MB):   Download the MP3 file    Listen in Real Audio

Read the transcript.

brian d foy
Director of Perl Mongers and spokesman for Perl 6

"[Larry Wall] did say that other languages have been stealing from Perl for a while now, and maybe it's time that Perl stole back."

Mark-Jason Dominus
Managing Editor of Perl.com

"Larry really needed to devolve some of his moral authority onto other people. I'm really glad to see that he's going to do that. Often he's unavailable -- he was out for months while he was working for the Camel (Programming Perl, 3rd Edition). And it's hard for the group to get along without someone who's officially able to make a decision."

 Mark-Jason Dominus
Dale Dougherty

Dale Dougherty
Moderator; Publisher of O'Reilly Network

"For me, the most interesting part of the Perl 6 announcement was not technical, but more about governance, if you will, or how the Perl community will create its own process to create Perl 6. There was some admission on one hand that the P5P process, the Perl Porters' list, its loose structure really is inadequate for getting work done in a timely fashion."

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