No - I'm just saying that it objectively gained a lot of popularity because they did some things right, and then lost it again because they got some things wrong.

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...

> I'm just saying that it objectively gained a lot of popularity because they did some things right, and then lost it again because they got some things wrong.

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.