It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

Agreed. Probably why they renamed it. I think everybody probably wishes they'd taken a new name from the start.

> It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the start.

We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.

Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.

Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10 years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before giving up on it again. Might be time to take another look.

There is a Perl 5 compatibility mode: it's called Inline::Perl5.

Maybe not the one that was originally planned. But that was only a real possibility if Perl 5 would be able to get rid of its XS addiction.

Ask yourself: how many of the up river Perl modules are Perl only?

Isn't that the definition of a breaking change?

yeah, in the same sense that D is a breaking change for C, or wayland for X11. the point is that as far as i know it was never intended that existing perl 5 code would be rewritten. unlike the python 2 to 3 change where the intention was that people would convert using 2to3 and later using compatibility modules that allowed writing code that works with both. python 2 development stopped after 12 years, much later than they expected.

If Ford makes a 4-door passenger car, and then comes out with a 2-door sports car, and keeps producing both cars, that's not a breaking change. It's just a new car.

Perl 5 is still supported, Perl 6 (Raku) continues independently.