Comment by senko

Perl 6 definitely sucked up any forward momentum in the community.

It's become a poster child for how not to do a major transition.

KDE3/4, GNOME 2/3, Python 2/3 transitions all benefited from this hindsight (still experiencing a lot of pain themselves).

Raku might be an interesting language (I haven't dug deep), but it's not Perl. Larry et al should've just called it separately from the start and allow others to carry on the Perl torch. They did this too late, when the momentum was already dead.

Perl 5 was a product of its time, but so was Linux, C, Python 2 or PHP3, and they're still very much relevant.