I feel that there should probably be a name change, but ultimately I don't really care. I am enjoying the language and they can call it whatever they want. If and when they change the name I will just refer to it as the new name.

A new name would have kept momentum in Perl 5 and it would have made Perl 6 more sexy. It is sad, Perl is amazing, I still use it as my personal scripting language. Back in the day I wrote complete enterprise applications.

> Should have chosen a different name for the language.

I wonder if Fortran 2008 wasn't called Fortran, could it be sold to computer science people as a "fast, type-checked matlab".

There were numerous discussions about this and it was decided against it.

Eventually one would use Perl 5 from inside Perl 6 with the "use v5" statement.

Clarification: Decided by the Perl 6 devs who want to keep the name and don't seem to care about the damage that decision does to Perl 5

One of the discussion was on the Perl blogs[1]. Most of the devs there are Perl 5 devs and they also decided against the name change. Perl 6 is the next iteration of Perl that has been redesigned from the ground up. Why should it bare a different name? Yes, the redesign took more than a decade and it's incompatible with Perl 5, but so is Python 3.6 compared to 2.7, albeit to a lesser extent. Even Perl 5.26 has changed a lot since 5.6. In fact the least common denominator is 5.10.1. Using older versions is discouraged since they're largely unsupported by the majority of CPAN modules.

1. http://blogs.perl.org

The most recent discussion I saw on this subject[1] makes it very clear that there isn't a consensus. If there is, it's in the "Perl 6 should rename" direction.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/7r1b33/an_open_letter...

> Yes, the redesign took more than a decade

Quite true! In fact, the redesign took more than a decade and a half (July 2000 to Dec 2015). A record worth breaking!

It was a decision made by Larry Wall alone.Since it’s his language, he’s allowed to do that.

If this really had worked seamlessly it would be great. But that includes /usr/bin/perl working this way on every OS etc... with a clear&easy upgrade path for existing code.

Well Perl 5 needs a spec in order to be supported inside Perl 5. Otherwise which version do you support? 5.6? 5.10.1? 5.16?

What ... like Ruby? :-)

Perl6 has some compatibility -- at the wetware level.

Which is not nothing.