Perl 6 started around when perl 5.8 was released.  Then Perl 5 went stagnant while most of the core language developers were working on Perl 6.  After a few years where there were competing implementations of perl 6, and still some wild ideas being tested, folks that still were using Perl 5 watched the rest of the languages develop, and the growing buglist against perl 5, and starting poaching ideas from Perl 6, ruby, python, and improving the Perl 5 runtime.<p>Eventually, The Perl 5 camp committed to regular releases, and continued renewed development in the engine, and it is still pretty good.  But the damage has been done @ this point -- a lot of the community has wandered off to other &#x27;cool&#x27; languages and frameworks.<p>The confusion will continue, especially since it&#x27;s become clear Perl 6 is quite the departure from Perl 5, and there is a <i>LOT</i> of code in the wild using Perl 5.  I&#x27;ve seen some talk of the Perl 5 folks asking Larry Wall to rename Perl 6, but he&#x27;s declined to do so.<p>With perl6&#x27;s grammar support, some folks are working on importing the perl5 grammar into perl6[0].  Fortunately, there&#x27;s a very rich testing environment(in the form of CPAN) to ensure this effort will be stable.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rakudo-p5&#x2F;v5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rakudo-p5&#x2F;v5&#x2F;</a>