[jjn1056]

Historically, Perl6 was supposed to be the next version of Perl (replace Perl5). There was a plan for Perl5 and Perl6 to share a new virtual machine and for there to be some sort of compatibility layer so that Perl6 could run Perl5 code. However when it started to take decades to complete Perl6, and when it started to become clear that Perl6 was so different from Perl5 that it was essentially a new language, working Perl5 developers started working on Perl5 again and porting as many Perl6 features as possible to Perl5 (although typically not as new minor versions of Perl5, but as modules on CPAN). So for example we have Moose which brings a lot of the best bits of Perl6 objects to Perl5. As a result many Perl5 programmers stopped waiting to be saved by Perl6 and just got on with it. Over time the distance between Perl5 and Perl6 communities grew, despite some efforts at unification, so that now the fact that both languages share the Perl name is a bit silly (in my opinion, but I know that's not universally shared). In fact there's been moments of hostility between the communities, over the Perl name and so forth. So sorry this is confusing to you, you are rightly confused and it saddens me that it happened. I wish that when it became clear that Perl6 was not replacing Perl5 that we'd have chosen a new name for Perl6. Unfortunately the groups running this are not democratically chosen people to represent the Perl community, just people that showed up and did work, so they often don't feel or care about the confusion. What I usually do is consider Perl5 the language and the version is 22 (the current release of Perl5), and I think of Perl6 as being alpha or beta for version zero. If you consider the number part of the language title it sorta can make some sense.