[chromatic]

But that's too late now....

Come now; that was the excuse given five and ten years ago.

the "Perl" brand is still very strong

Some would argue (including the post to which you're replying) that the brand is much less so, thanks to the very line of thinking you're defending.

[ab5tract]

I've been in and around Perl for a long time, and this line of argument feels very tired to me.

Perl 6 did not "kill" the Perl brand, the state of Perl circa-2000 "killed" the Perl brand. All the issues @perlgeek just noted, those "killed" the Perl brand. The fact that Python was simply a better option for 99% of the projects that were started around that time (even if half or more went with PHP instead) "killed" the Perl brand.

If Perl 5 as a programming language is so susceptible to "oh but this new version makes it seem that there are deficiencies in the current version", could it be because there are deficiencies in Perl 5? If hiding that fact from others is so important to the "brand of Perl", what does that actually imply?

Please stop pretending that starting a project to build a better Perl somehow killed the camel. It's obvious that this is not true even from a Perl 5 usage standpoint, but it's even more absurd from the standpoint of next year, or the year after...

[chromatic]

Please stop pretending that starting a project to build a better Perl somehow killed the camel.

It's easy to look at the rate of change and the timeline of releases of Perl after 2000. It's easy for me to argue that the announcement of P6 (and the promise that 6.0 would be a successor to 5.10 or 5.12) took a lot of momentum from working on Perl.

I suspect, but can't prove without a time machine and a multiverse, that if the "they're sister languages" line of thinking had been in place from the start, Perl could have avoided its lost decade (5.6.0 to 5.10.1).

[ab5tract]

But Perl 5 is _not_ dead. The camel lives, and has two humps. The "lost decade" cannot be ascribed only to Perl 6. Developers were leaving in droves to newer dynamic languages of the same generation (Python, PHP, and eventually Ruby).

I can agree that it had an influence, but I'm sick of the Perl 5 perspectives that a) the language is flawless and only an idiot would choose something else, b) Perl 6 pointed to flaws which don't exist because hand-waving, Rule A, etc.

Perl 5 has fundamental problems. At first Perl 6 was an attempt to solve those problems without a complete compatability break. That proved impossible, so the scope expanded to be a new Perl.

"But it's painting a bad picture of Perl 5!"

Perl 5 painted it's own picture, I'm sorry to say. The toxicity of p5p, the constant "this language is fine why are you making a new one", the over-confidence that Perl 5 is a pinnacle of how you can design a Perl language... these are Perl 5 things, and they belong to Perl 5. Yet I rarely see Perl 5 programmers owning to these facts.

It's just tired. You yourself did a great job in breathing new life into Perl 5, as part of the Modern Perl movement, which takes as its starting point that Perl 5 allows some seriously flawed programming. Techniques and ideas borrowing from Perl 6 are used to make life easier in Perl 5, developed during the "lost decade".

So, I'm sticking to my position that this whole line of thinking is just tired. For outsiders, Perl 5 was a non-starter because of all the flaws with the language, not because another version was in the pipeline that promised to fix those flaws.

FWIW, I program in Perl 5 every day, and I really enjoy the language.