I think more than anything it was an error in the messaging.
Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, since people assumed that Perl 5 would be soon dead, and Perl 6 had a new different syntax. And then it took 15 years to happen, during which Python and others ate its lunch.
I think a more successful strategy would have been to make it clear very early on that Perl 6 would be some sort of long term experimental project, and that Perl 5 would be expected to be a thing for a long time still.
If in 2015 Perl 5 still had a thriving ecosystem, and there was a demand of Perl-like but better, then Perl 6 could have been more successful. But in the current timeline it's a successor to an almost defunct language, and isn't such an attractive proposition.
Perl 6 was treated as the successor of Perl 5 -- and that was the mistake. It meant Perl 5 started dying, since people assumed that Perl 5 would be soon dead, and Perl 6 had a new different syntax. And then it took 15 years to happen, during which Python and others ate its lunch.
I think a more successful strategy would have been to make it clear very early on that Perl 6 would be some sort of long term experimental project, and that Perl 5 would be expected to be a thing for a long time still.
If in 2015 Perl 5 still had a thriving ecosystem, and there was a demand of Perl-like but better, then Perl 6 could have been more successful. But in the current timeline it's a successor to an almost defunct language, and isn't such an attractive proposition.