Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future.
I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) The situation is quite different from Python 3, which is the newest incarnation of the Python language.
From what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.
The original plan, as I recall, was to move everyone to the Parrot VM, such that there would be a Perl 5 compiler, a Perl 6 compiler, a your-language-here compiler, and everyone would be able to share code in an environment that was similar to the JVM but friendlier to dynamic languages.
So Perl 5 was never going to go away like Perl 4 had, it was just going to become one element of a broader ecosystem.
Comments
Perl 6's biggest mistake was naming their language Perl. It turns out Perl-6 is a completely different language from Perl-5, although they share the surrounding ecosystem. But now that the name is taken, Perl-5 is up to version 20.2 with no clear solution in sight to communicate version numbers in the future.
I don't think any of the Perl-6 developers actually advocates switching from Perl-5. (But please correct me if I'm wrong.) The situation is quite different from Python 3, which is the newest incarnation of the Python language.
From what I've heard of it I'm guessing they would be advocating switching to Perl-6 for new projects if perl-6 had actually shipped a 1.0/6.0 type release and seemed to be succeeding as a practical language.
The original plan, as I recall, was to move everyone to the Parrot VM, such that there would be a Perl 5 compiler, a Perl 6 compiler, a your-language-here compiler, and everyone would be able to share code in an environment that was similar to the JVM but friendlier to dynamic languages.
So Perl 5 was never going to go away like Perl 4 had, it was just going to become one element of a broader ecosystem.