Via this comment, Larry has said:

I am in favor of this change, because it reflects an ancient wisdom: "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved."

Unsurprisingly, it's a Biblical quote.

But what does this mean?

Well, first, it looks like raku is now going to be the official name of Perl 6.

Second, it will hopefully put to rest many of the deeply divisive arguments people in the Perl community have had over the rename. Though support for a rename was overwhelming, there was a loud minority who objected. But through it all, one thing remained clear: everyone meant well.

There's more to be said there, but I think that's enough: everyone meant well. That's something everyone (including myself), could stand to keep in mind more often. Even if someone strongly disagrees with you, they're generally meaning well and we should approach things from that spirit.

But that's behind us now (hopefully). With Larry blessing the change, it's time for us to look to the future and put the past behind us.

So what does raku offer us?

A powerful dynamic language with a working concurrency model

Gradual typing

Optional type inference (still a work in progress)

Easy creation of custom types that match business needs, not computer needs

A powerful OO system that leapfrogs the capabilities of most other languages

Grammars which make pcre look like archaic toys

The potential of having the fastest dynamic language due to its sound architecture

Given the amazing performance improvements made in raku in the past year (and it often outperforms Perl in many areas), and the roadmap for many more performance improvements, this is a perfect time for raku to be launched as a new language.

One of the many things I love about raku is that when I've given presentations about it, I constantly hear from developers about how feature X solves a thorny problem they have, but many developers identify a different "feature X." Raku isn't a one-trick pony designed to scratch a particular itch; it's become a robust, mature specification with a powerful implementation which gives it capabilities which far surpass many other languages. And the awesome concurrency model is icing on the cake.

But whither Perl? I've already been contacted by a reporter about what the rename means for the future of Perl and raku. I've had some developers contact me asking if we can rename Perl to Perl 7 now. I think there's going to be some interesting times ahead, but I don't know how versioning is going to work for Perl yet. There are a number of viable alternatives and I expect that debate will also be contentious.

For Perl to have a new, major release, a few things should probably happen. These assume that a major release is the time when perhaps we can break backwards-compatability.

Signatures must no longer be experimental

A solid OO system must become core

Deprecated features should be identified and eliminated

There's probably more, but those are just my thoughts off the top of my head. It's an exciting time and I'm looking forward to seeing what the future brings for both Perl and raku.