The first is that Perl 5 (the mature language) suffered greatly from the premature announcement of the Perl 6 project, more than ten years ago, which still hasn't shipped anything as stable and mature as, say, Python 3. (Several years ago, someone at my company showed up to work carrying a book entitled "Perl 6 Today". I asked where he'd gotten the time machine.)
The second is that if you look at blog posts and the like from inside the Perl community, such as it now is, you get the impression that it's the kind of crowd that thinks they're smarter than everyone else because no one else gets their inside jokes. Which comes from the top --- Larry Wall seems to think he's really clever when he justifies some of Perl's more dubious features by pointing out that natural languages do that too. But natural language has a full human intelligence at the other end sorting out the ambiguities, and even then, we still sometimes get it wrong. "Rakudo Star" is not that smart, much less Perl 5.
Please tell me you aren't comparing the timelines of Perl6 with Python3? That is ludicrous. Py3 is an incremental change while P6 is a total re-write of the language. Not even in the same league.
No, I'm saying that ten years is a long time for Perl 5 to be under the shadow of an anointed successor which has yet to show up --- something which is a real problem now for the Python folks even though they're going through a smaller change which was better managed in every respect.
So many of the improvements in the Perl ecosystem--especially the Perl 5 ecosystem--have their roots in Perl 6 it's difficult to say that Perl 5 is in its shadow. If anything, Perl 6 rejuvenated Perl 5: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-...
The first is that Perl 5 (the mature language) suffered greatly from the premature announcement of the Perl 6 project, more than ten years ago, which still hasn't shipped anything as stable and mature as, say, Python 3. (Several years ago, someone at my company showed up to work carrying a book entitled "Perl 6 Today". I asked where he'd gotten the time machine.)
The second is that if you look at blog posts and the like from inside the Perl community, such as it now is, you get the impression that it's the kind of crowd that thinks they're smarter than everyone else because no one else gets their inside jokes. Which comes from the top --- Larry Wall seems to think he's really clever when he justifies some of Perl's more dubious features by pointing out that natural languages do that too. But natural language has a full human intelligence at the other end sorting out the ambiguities, and even then, we still sometimes get it wrong. "Rakudo Star" is not that smart, much less Perl 5.