Three Tales of Second System Syndrome
<p><pre><code>    It just might be possible that Perl 6's crazy long development process can
    produce the best-adopted second system around
</code></pre>
Unfortunately, I don't share the same optimism as the OP. In the real world, adoption is not only driven by how cool a language is, but the ecosystem of tools and developers around it. There are lots of Perl 5 codebases which won't be migrated because it's too expensive.<p>The true lesson learned for language developers is: Don't break backwards compatibility. Ever.<p>The Python community made this mistake, and they acknowledge it. Guido said this won't happen again. But at least for the case of Python 3, the number of breakages is relatively small, and the migration from 2 to 3 while tedious, it's not that hard. Even so, the migration of the whole ecosystem has been really really slow. But I think in the end the community will move.<p>The Perl case, on the other side, is much worse. Migrating a relatively complex project from 5 to 6 is extraordinarily hard. It's probably the same as a whole rewrite. Also, the community is divided, with some developers keeping the improvement of Perl 5, fixing bugs and adding new features. There is no incentive for migration.<p>If the migration has been so slow for Python 3, which had a much smaller barrier, I don't see how it could be better for Perl 6.<p>New languages are able to develop a new ecosystem when they introduce innovative features, e.g. Rust. But Perl 6 while being a nice language, doesn't seem to have any killer feature compared to mainstream languages.