I'm still confused about what happened to Perl 6! "replaced with it's new name" -- googling, that's "raku". So... what was going to be Perl 6 is considered a different language, and not particularly compatible with Perl. But "Perl 7" is meant to be less of a departure?
It is weird OP left Perl 6 out of the story of "what happened to Perl 7". I guess it's just too painful?
First, the Perl 6 development had bad project management. According to the reports, the culture attracted experimentalists with interesting ideas, but didn't get along with boring people who wanted to do things like releases and steadily approaching functionality. So there were a number of projects, a number of which were abandoned. Things dragged on, and nobody was cracking the whip. It took 15 years for Perl 6 to finally announce its first official release.
Perl 6 also turned out to be too different from Perl 5. Different syntax, and no XS, which meant every Perl module interfacing with a library wouldn't work even if some sort of automatic conversion, or compatibility mode was possible. XS is tied to Perl 5's internals, and Perl 6 was an effort to make a new language from scratch, without using the old interpreter.
Meanwhile, people started abandoning Perl 5 reasoning that since Perl 6 was in development, 5 would eventually die, and the lack of compatibility would mean current efforts on 5 would be wasted.
It took a very long time but finally it was decided that Perl 6 wasn't really Perl 6, but some other, Perl-like language, and renamed to "Raku" to signal this. But by then it was already too late, most everyone had already moved on, and by the time when Perl 6 was finally released it was an extremely niche thing very few people had any interest in.
Meanwhile, Perl 5 development continued in the background, and they decided that it'd jump version from 5 to 7 to avoid confusion. Perl 7 is the direct descendant of Perl 5, with the same syntax, new features and very few deprecated things.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I would like to emphasize the ordering of these events: first "Perl 6 was finally released", and only later was it "decided that Perl 6 wasn't really Perl 6 [...] and renamed to Raku to signal this". It was too late not only because most everyone had already moved on (by the reasons you mentioned: why would anyone invest in Perl 5, when the migration to Perl 6 would throw away all that investment?), but also because Perl 6 had already been released under the "Perl 6" name.
It's a pity really, lots of people worked hard on it, and I think things could have worked out better by just better messaging. Doing the "Perl 6 to Raku" renaming early on might have salvaged things.
I think this is an important lesson -- technical skills are great, but communication is extremely important.
Did you read the FA? They decided that, "Yeah nevermind: we're not going to call it Perl 7 ", until some future time where it may make sense to do so to somebody again - but maybe not, who knows? Backwards compatibility, everyone!
I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.
I admit I only skimmed it, I was busy at the time. But it's not too incorrect anyway: Perl 7 will be a direct descendant of Perl 5, whenever that happens.
> I'm not sure if I quite understand the Perl community problem of seemingly never, ever wanting to commit to something new. It's the metaphorical problem of not being able to get across the creek, because you imagine your feet glued to the stepping stone you're on.
I don't think there's a general "Perl community". I mean it's a thing that exists, but as I see it, it's a smaller and tighter group than the general set of people using Perl. There were lots of people that used Perl for whatever needs they had and were never regulars at conventions, Perlmonks and other places, and as a result had little influence and weren't up to date on what the core people were doing.
Many of those also had no interest in committing to such a thing. Eg, they were writing stuff for their day job, and had little interest in participating in the development of the language.
If you're a "move fast and break things" kind-of guy, watching the perl devs in action will annoy you, because they're committed to not breaking things, and if they have to move slow to avoid it, they will.
On the other hand, if you want to be sloppy with your own perl code, or work with CPAN modules that move faster, that's up to you.
Actually, it is not weird when you consider what the article is about. The announcement of Perl 7 was not about Perl 6, it was about Perl 5. Perl 6 had been already been renamed to Raku almost a year prior (Oct '19, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl). Well, OK, it was about Perl 6 in the sense that newer versions of Perl 5 could not be called Perl 6, but that's about all. Raku/Perl 6 is a related but different language (hence the rename).
I suspect the Perl Steering Council was writing mostly to people who are focused on Perl 5. The announcement about bumping Perl 5 to version 7 created some controversy (centered on what the changes to Perl 5 would be for the bump to version 7). This led to the new governance structure discussed in the article, but it also kind of left people in the Perl 5 community hanging. A lot of them were thinking things like "OK, so are we going to bump to version 7 now, or not?" I think that is what they were trying to address. And anyone who is focused on Perl 5 already knows all about Perl 6/Raku, so there is little reason to bring it up in this article.
