There are plenty of Perl5 users that have never liked the idea of &quot;Perl6&quot; and swear that they will never use it. That is just one of the reasons why Perl6 took awhile to release. It was not made by the Perl5 community, it was&#x2F;is a different community although it does have some Perl5 guys strewn through it. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I plan on picking it up soon. So yes, non-perl people should try it. Other than the name, and Larry Wall, there is not much the same between the two.<p>I am not following your issues with the versioning. Perl6 was supposed to be released like back in 2005 or so. In that context it made sense that the next release of Perl would be 6 and that the 5 series would just go into maintenance only mode. But that didn&#x27;t really happen. Perl5 devs continued to do their own thing while a new community was built around Perl6 with different people.