Marketing is important. I did have people ask me if there was any point to learning Perl 5 when Perl 6 was just around the corner, and people buying the butterfly book instead of the llama book for the same reason.

Then the Python people did the same mistake. Beginners learned Python 3 and then had trouble with App Engine or some other platform. The most popular question in Python forums for many years was if someone should learn 2 or 3. Some probably just went with Go instead.