In my recollection, Perl 6 did not start with marketing. It started out of frustration because of several problems that were needed to be solved to move forward with Perl 5, and solving those problems would mean breaking backward compatibility. It started with a cup-throwing moment. With groups of people sitting around and discussing and writing down things that needed to change. It took quite some time before marketing came into it.
Interesting. I remember a lot of discussion about Perl 6 history a while back in a very long thread, Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018, where the second-system effect was mentioned. Though there are many historical examples of when rewriting worked well (like the Perl 5 "rewrite" of Perl 4) ... and where it worked not so well (like the Perl 6 "rewrite" of Perl 5) ... I still find it a hard and perplexing problem.
The early Perl 6 folks acknowledged this potential pitfall from the beginning, even using it in their slogan (Apocalypse 12):
The official unofficial slogan of Perl 6 is "Second System Syndrome Done Right!"
Larry gave further background in InfoWorld Larry Wall Interview (2015):
So early on, our slogan, or at least one of them, was "Second System Syndrome Done Right." And how do you do that? Well, you just have to take long enough. Companies can't do that because they have a bottom line and a burn rate. But we're an open source community, not needing to make a profit, only to do good in the world. So you know the saying, "Good, fast, cheap: pick two." Well, by definition our community has to do it cheap, so the saying reduces to "Good, Fast: pick one." And we quite intentionally picked good rather than fast.
See also: Three Tales of Second System Syndrome (blog by Brent Laabs where he discusses Perl 6, Python 3, and PHP 6 circa 2015).
In reply to Re^4: Why Perl in 2020
by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Why Perl in 2020
by ait
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