Perl 6 was allegedly imminent enough in 2007/2008 that I was considering using it for a new project at that time before determining that it wasn't quite there yet. It wasn't until 2019 that Perl 6 officially became Raku and even later that Perl 7 was announced. A lost decade in the development of a language is pretty bad (although not as bad as the lost 25 years for LaTeX3, which has had the advantage of not having any serious competitors).
That only happened after a decade of everyone being told Perl 6 was the next version, and people gave up and stopped paying attention. Since no one is paying attention anymore, recent changes to the plans or names have simply not been noticed by most people, so you need a full-on marketing campaign to get most people to become even aware of Raku. Announcing Perl 7 seems like it would be a good way to do that.
But what he said is true. With all the focus on Perl 6, Perl 5 stagnated for nearly 20, with barely any improvements. Other languages came along and displaced Perl for many jobs.
No, Perl won't disappear any time soon. It still excels at a few things. And like Fortran and COBOL, Perl will also have a long life as a legacy language.
... why do you think Perl 5 stagnated for 20 years ?
There were like 10% performance improvements at each new release, a lot of work was done in modules which was by design Perl 5 having a small core and a lot of the features being implemented in modules ...
What feature exists in other languages (except for CPU types: int, float, char etc.) and does not exist in Perl 5 ?
