MSFT smear campaign??? Dude, there is no campaign. There never was. There's the Perl 6 aka let's add absolutely anything anyone can think of into the language and then some more bummer. The twenty years of "it will be ready by next Christmas" followed by "we finally admit that the result doesn't look anything like Perl, let's invent a new name, draw a childish logo and babble about inclusivity". That's what killed Perl.

That project should never have been called Perl 6! Not even before the absolutely insane feature creep.