Perl 6.c, Perl 6.d -> SQL-2011, SQL-2016
Rakudo Star -> MySQL
Rakudo compiler backends (for MoarVM, JVM, JS) -> MySQL storage engines (InnoDB, MyISAM, ...)
Having different names for languages, language spec versions, language implementations, and backends doesn't seem unknown in successful projects.
Other than the problem of “Perl” in the name, all of this is fairly boringly normal.
Of course part of that is technical, but part of 'marketing' is understanding what your users want and delivering it to them.
This article I wrote about Tcl a while back is what I'm talking about: https://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went...
Yeah, but you keep pointing to things that are exactly like many successful projects as wrong, like having a different name for the language vs. an implementation vs. backends used by the implementation.
I will suggest that the two things they actuallt got wrong were:
(1) Calling it “perl”, and
(2) Taking forever.
And, really, those two in combination: even being as distinct as it is, had it stabilized in a reasonable period of time, and had once it stabilized a reasonable transition path been provided, it might have been another Python 2 to Python 3 problem, but not a complete disaster. Conversely, ha for been a new experimental language and not “Perl 6”, taking forever to stabilize would have been more tolerable.
That sounds like a really solid foundation to build a business on...
I think if people are willing to look with an unbiased eye, there are a lot of software marketing lessons to be learned from the rise and fall of Perl. It got a bunch of stuff right back in the day.