That feels like the best way to save the brand. Cut a Perl 7 release concurrently with the Raku v1 release, and just get on a regular schedule of incrementing the version every 6 or 12 months.

Edit: Okay, starting from the minor version instead of 7 sounds like an even better approach.

Not exactly the same situation, but this reminds me of Angular. Angular 2 was a marketing debacle; the official stance of "Angular != AngularJS" is stubborn and nonsensical — any idiot can see that they're confusingly similar, and if they're supposed to be different then why is the first Angular release version 2.0.0 instead of 1.0.0? (I personally think they should've called it Circular.)

In any case, I think the way they moved forward (with "Angular 2" no longer being a thing, except in reference to that specific release) was ultimately the best way to salvage the situation; given its recovery and growth since then I'd say Perl could take some lessons from it.

Yes for Perl 5->7, but it would be good to have a solid-ish feature change or addition to justify the jump and promote it.

When I see that we still don't have a simple "is item 'in' set" operator, 12 (?) years after the introduction of smartmatch and 5 or 6 years after its half-retraction...

(Well, we still have no sets either :-), let's talk about lists/arrays...)

When I see we still don't have a clean function parameters declaration system (better than the mess with prototypes and signatures)...

When I see that constants, enums, simple structured data (C-like-ish structs) still have to be simulated with functions and/or objects and the weight which comes together...

...On one hand, it gives a set of features that could be used to justify a jump. On the other hand, if these basic features has never been deemed useful by the language leaders until now (that is, during a couple of decades), I have little hope they will change their minds.

There is little strain on the "language leaders" (that would be barking up the wrong tree, anyway) as the features you named with one exception are already done and have been available for years.

• "is item 'in' set" operator: https://metacpan.org/pod/Syntax::Feature::In

• sets: https://metacpan.org/pod/Set::Object

• clean function parameters declaration system: https://metacpan.org/pod/Kavorka::Manual::Signatures

• constants that are not functions/objects: https://metacpan.org/pod/Const::Fast

• enums that are not functions/objects: ?

• structs that are not functions/objects: pack/unpack, for explanation see https://metacpan.org/pod/Convert::Binary::C

From what I gathered, I believe that Perl 5 would transition to the minor version number much like how Java did (1.7 -> 7).

I feel like this is what Perl11 could end up being if it actually becomes a version of Perl instead of a kind of collection of Perl5 descendants: http://perl11.org/

Just keep perl 5 running forever please. I don't want to have to re-write the perl I wrote in 2001 that is still running in production. I wish now I had never started writing stuff in Python 2.

Like PHP