Perl is a weird language language for you to cite when we're talking about languages that do major transitions well. Perl 6 was created because Perl 5 was an evolutionary dead end, took 15 years, has no adoption, and Perl 5 usage shrunk tremendously in the meantime. Not saying this glibly as I love Perl and I hope Perl 6 sees some adoption, but come on now. Also remember that Perl 5 itself was nearly a complete rewrite from 4.
Exactly my thought regarding the need to evolve as a language. Perl is mostly dead because it didn't keep up with the times and I say that as a person who spent a tremendous amount of time learning and using Perl. The Schwartzarian transform was a beautiful thing to behold.
Perl is born to solve portability and limitation problems of shells (csh, sh, ksh*), awk and sed. People who do not live on the command line can not appreciate the power of perl.
Huh. I guess it's one of those cases where once you have a thing, you wonder how you could have gone 20 years without it. :) Although, to be fair, I only started working with Perl (beyond one-liners on the shell) in 2012.
Unlike Python 3's relation to Python 2, Perl 6 is genuinely a new language. It would make little sense for the community to discontinue Perl 5 and push for Perl 6.
In retrospect it probably would have been better for the community if they'd given Perl 6 a new name.
