I agree. All of what you said, along with an ambiguous release date for 6, with the caveat that it always seemed like it was just around the corner, made me back off digging really deep into 5 thinking 6 was just constantly a few months away.
After 3 or 4 years of crying wolf, I and the rest of the industry simply moved on.
When 6 finally started coming out, the complex release mechanism and the difficulty in firing up a fresh install of *-nix and typing "perl" really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Lots of that has finally cleaned up, but Perl6 is not a default package in any OS yet, and there's still years of performance improvements yet to do before it's really production ready.
I think the very fast progress of Go has also made me rethink spending time with Perl 6 and instead thinking of taking some time to get familiar with Go.
(I say all this as a very huge Perl fan who's solved some very hard problems in the past with Perl and had it help me make a successful career out of being able to solve those kinds of problems without lots of fuss).
After 3 or 4 years of crying wolf, I and the rest of the industry simply moved on.
When 6 finally started coming out, the complex release mechanism and the difficulty in firing up a fresh install of *-nix and typing "perl" really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Lots of that has finally cleaned up, but Perl6 is not a default package in any OS yet, and there's still years of performance improvements yet to do before it's really production ready.
I think the very fast progress of Go has also made me rethink spending time with Perl 6 and instead thinking of taking some time to get familiar with Go.
(I say all this as a very huge Perl fan who's solved some very hard problems in the past with Perl and had it help me make a successful career out of being able to solve those kinds of problems without lots of fuss).