Perl 6 renamed to Raku

The Raku people realised they are a completely new language; the PHP people surprisingly got a clue, threw away PHP 6 and based PHP 7 on PHP 5… only the Python people insist that py3k is not a new language ☹

It's not that it's not feasible, and perl 6 retains much perl 5 compatibility, it's that the design goals and community have changed sufficiently that both sides needed freedom to define their own futures. It's really the classical best-reason for a corporate breakup or spin-off.

Perl 6 is a great, concurrency and object focused language that could more than hold its own against the node's and other use-cases of today, but hasn't gotten a particularly fair shake.

Perl 5 (a.k.a. "perl") is as useful as it ever was and has been adding plenty of features and improvements over the years (including backporting many of the most useful features from the perl 6 design), but has been constricted by it being seen as a dead-end, maintenance branch for "the future of perl" despite the work.

Although there have been strong opinions, IMO this really is the best for both sides of the community. The only hope is that it's not too late for either side to mount a strong path forward.

Not really. Eg, Perl 5 uses "funny characters" partly in a way similar to articles in natural languages, with @ denoting a plural and $ a singular. In practice, this means that @a is an array, $a[0] is the first element of this array, @a[0 .. 4] is a slice composed of the first five elements and $a[0 .. 4] is a weird way to refer to $a[1] (in scalar context, the range operator, .., evaluates to 0[*] or 1 depending on whether the first or the second argument has a value which is regarded as true). TLFKAP6 uses @ and $ as namespace separators for arrays and scalars, with @a being an array and @a[0] being the first element of it. This means someone has to go through the code and change an open-ended number of $ to @ depending on what it's supposed to be and each of these changes has to be tested somehow in order to determine if the code still works. This is obviously doable but technically pointless for working code and possibly a lot of work.

[*] It really returns an undefined value which will be autoconverted to 0 or an empty string if either a number or a string was called for (possibly emitting a warning in some subset of the possible use cases of this if this has been enabled).