Perl 6 - History

History

In Perl 6, we decided it would be better to fix the language than fix the user

— Larry Wall

The Perl 6 design process was first announced on July 19, 2000, on the fourth day of that year's Perl Conference, by Larry Wall in his State of the Onion 2000 talk. At that time, the primary goals were to remove "historical warts" from the language; "easy things should stay easy, hard things should get easier, and impossible things should get hard;" a general cleanup of the internal design and APIs. The process began with a series of requests for comments or "RFCs". This process was open to all contributors, and left no aspect of the language closed to change.

Once the RFC process was complete, Wall reviewed and classified each request (361 were received). He then began the process of writing several "Apocalypses", a term which means "revealing." While the original goal was to write one Apocalypse for each chapter of Programming Perl, it became obvious that, as each Apocalypse was written, previous Apocalypses were being invalidated by later changes. For this reason, a set of Synopses were published, each one relating the contents of an Apocalypse, but with any subsequent changes reflected in updates. Today, Perl 6 specification continues almost entirely within the Synopses.

There are also a series of Exegeses written by Damian Conway that explain the content of each Apocalypse in terms of practical usage. Each Exegesis consists of code examples along with discussion of the usage and implications of the examples.

There are three primary methods of communication used in the development of Perl 6 today. The first is the #perl6 IRC channel on freenode. The second is a set of mailing lists on The Perl Foundation's servers at perl.org. The third is the Git source code repository hosted at https://github.com/perl6.