The problem isn't that all this happened, or maybe that is the problem, the problem is that the future of Perl was very confusing for a very long time.

Python 3 was announced in 2006, committed to as the future in 2008, and the last significant release of Python 2 was in 2010. There was a hard deprecation deadline of the Python 2 in 2015, which was postponed in 2014 to 2020. It wasn't fantastic and there was some pain and some poor decisions but everybody knew where the language was going and how to stay in front of it.

Perl 6 was announced in 2000 and there were only 2 releases of Perl 5 for 7 years. Then in the 2007-2010 timeframe regular releases of Perl 5 resumed. Eventually everyone kind of realized that Perl6 was DOA as the next major release of Perl, but that process happened gradually over the course of nearly 20 years, by which time most of the rest of the world had written off Perl as a significant entity.

They should have done what the YAML designers did when they suddenly realized to their great surprise that the language they themselves designed and named was NOT actually a markup language:

Keep the exact same name and a perfectly straight face, then recursively retronymonically redefine it to mean something completely different: the opposite of what it initially meant!

"Yet Another Markup Language" => "YAML Ain't Markup Language"

So "PERL 5" is to "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language 6", as "PERL 6" is a "PERL E___ R___ L___ 6".

(Pattern matching and filling in the blanks is left as an exercise for GTP-3.)

Programmers Embraced Rasmus Lerdorf?

Or PERL Embarrassed Rasmus Lerdorf!

Eh, it sorta still is? Not really, but if you spent ten years announcing an upcoming perl6, then you rename it to Raku... There will be confusion, at least.

Perl 6 was released in December 2015. A little under 4 years later, it was renamed to Raku. Plenty of time to not be confused.

Not just confusion. If you hype it up as the future and then drop it how excited are people really going to get for the old stuff?

I'm not in the Perl world. I have heard of Perl 6 and know what it is. I've never heard of Raku before this thread. "perl6" and "perl 6" together have 58 matches on this page right now (before my comment). Raku has 28.