Is Perl 6 Being Renamed?

There is a certain contingent of developers who should have been all over Perl 6 and very excited about it. We should have been seeing the stream of "$COMMON_LIBRARY but in Perl 6!" postings on HN for a couple of years, along with the blog posts of "look how crap this is to write in $OTHER_LANGUAGE but with this bit here and there look at how slick the Perl 6 solution is!" every couple of weeks. We should be seeing blog posts about the joys of working in a language with built-in grammar support replacing the old ad-hoc regex support, and how well it integrates with the rest of the features. We should have even eventually seen the contrarian backlash posts about how much of a mess you can make if you overload all your operators and grammar constructs and use all the features at once in an ill-advised manner, followed by comment thread semi-flamewars about whether bad code is the fault of the programmer or the language.

But we didn't.

Bias disclosure: I actually have no interest in Perl 6, so this isn't advocacy. Anything I've ever seen that Perl 6 looks interesting to me (emphasis) for, I'd rather just use Haskell, which I've already learned and actually does quite a lot of what Perl 6 does. But Perl 6 does it without being a immutable functional programming language, making this all a lot more accessible to a lot of programmers. I'm not saying I'm interested in Perl 6; I'm saying, there is definitely a chunk of programmers who should have been interested in it who are not.

And from what I can see, this naming confusion is one of the major reasons.

(One other one I would point to is the Perl 6 community's multi-year "joke" that Perl 6 would be released "next Christmas", which nobody outside of the Perl 6 community found even slightly funny, instead creating a reputation for the community that overpromises and underdelivers; that a few people would swoop in to those conversations to actually mock people who weren't insiders enough to know it was a joke and not a real promise, which is to say, 99.9999999% of humanity (that is not random nines; that is all but ~700 people; take one off if you like), really didn't help. I put "remaining reason" in my first paragraph because this has been resolved for many years now. But I can tell you that this significantly diminished my own personal interest, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Finally, I'd point to it just never being done, but, arguably, that alone couldn't have killed it. There's plenty of languages that grow quite substantially over time; the Python of when Python first really got popular and the Python of today are very different, for instance. Had more people been interested and pushing for something usable $TODAY, with more work being done later, this probably wouldn't have been as big a deal.)

* Perl 5 can continue being "perl" and have a future. People with existing perl codebases won't think they're going to need to upgrade.

* Camilia/Raku/etc can be considered on its own merits.

The C/C++ analogy is a good one: when things are different enough you stop expecting everyone to "upgrade" and instead are making a different language.

No, it's also declining. If not for anything else, because most younger devs won't touch it (either 5 or 6).