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.