Editing Portal:Perl History (section)

=== The Perl 7 controversy ===

After the Raku rename, the version number '''6''' was effectively unavailable for Perl’s own future. In 2020, Sawyer X announced a plan for '''Perl 7''' at The Perl Conference in the Cloud. The proposal was not for a complete rewrite. Instead, Perl 7 was described as essentially Perl 5.32 with more modern defaults, such as stricter behavior and fewer historical assumptions.<ref>Brian D Foy, “Announcing Perl 7,” Perl.com, June 24, 2020, https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

The announcement created excitement because it suggested that Perl could finally make a clean public break from the confusing Perl 5 / Perl 6 era. Perl 7 promised a stronger marketing message: Perl was not frozen, not abandoned, and not merely a legacy language. It also promised a way to reduce the amount of boilerplate required for modern Perl programs.

However, the proposal soon became controversial. Perl’s great strength had always been backward compatibility, especially the ability to keep old scripts and CPAN modules working across many years. Changing defaults at a major version boundary raised difficult questions about old code, distribution packaging, CPAN testing, documentation, and what `/usr/bin/perl` should mean on Unix-like systems.

As discussion continued, the original Perl 7 plan lost momentum. The Perl Steering Council later explained that it had generally decided against using Perl 7 as a backward-incompatible boundary and had rejected the original Perl 7 plan. The Council stated that a future Perl 7 might still happen, but only when the language had accumulated enough meaningful improvements to justify a major version number. Until then, Perl would continue with the Perl 5.x release series.<ref>Perl Steering Council, “What happened to Perl 7?” blogs.perl.org, May 25, 2022, https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

For critics, the Perl 7 episode became another self-inflicted wound. After years of confusion caused by Perl 6, the Perl 7 announcement appeared to offer a fresh start, but the community was unable to convert the announcement into a clear release. The result was a second branding disappointment: Perl had publicly promised a new major version, then retreated into caution and process. Supporters of the retreat argued that preserving compatibility was the responsible choice. Critics argued that the failure reinforced the outside perception that Perl could not make decisive language or marketing decisions.

The Perl 7 controversy therefore occupies an important place in modern Perl history. It showed that the Perl community understood the need for renewal, but also that renewal was constrained by Perl’s installed base, CPAN compatibility, conservative governance, and the lingering damage caused by the Perl 6 era.