You can break backwards compatibility, if you are careful.

In fact, Perl even had the tools to break backwards compatibility baked in from the v5 days.

I agree that Perl 6 is why perl died, but I think the thing that really killed it is what you mentioned. It was a completely different language that spend over a decade with a release date of "soon".

Who wants to work on a language that isn't being worked on because the next thing is AND where from what you know of the next thing everything will be a complete rewrite.

▲ MegaDeKay 4 hours ago | parent [-]

A completely different language, a decade of development to Perl 6, and Python eating its lunch in the meantime. Perl is often called a write only language, and there's Python with

    for line in file:

If you were new to the field at that time, Python seemed like a no-brainer.

	▲	afc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Even as an experienced developer who even owned CPAN modules and was very familiar with the Unix ways, Python was a no-brainer. I mention this on light of the article's claim that this has to do with "a new generation of programmers brought up on … I don’t know, Microsoft systems, Visual Basic and Java". No. The new languages that appeared were just so much much better.