perl6 is a separate language designed by some of the same people.
I'm a perl5 hacker at heart and intend to continue to be.
The latest version of perl5 is version 12.3, released rather recently.
The websites for both languages now make this clear, but we'll probably need to rename them both to "-something- perl" for people to stop being confused by the names. Maybe in the next year or so.
The Zope community experienced similar (self inflicted) branding damage with Zope 3. The goal of Zope 3 was to build a next-generation rapid app development toolkit, incorporating lessons learned over the life of Zope 2. This is perfectly laudable goal, but developers heard "zope" and thought they could leverage existing knowledge, best practices, and tools. Then they learned that "zope 2" products wouldn't work under zope 3. Then they learned how much they would have to unlearn from one project to the other. Then they gnashed their terrible teeth, and roared their terrible roars, and finally the zope 3 developers got the message and renamed their framework "Bluebream." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream )
As someone who worked at a shop that migrated from python/Zope to java/hibernate/GWT during the "zope 3 WTF?" days, I can attest that the confusion created by poor naming choices, and the lack of clarity in product roadmaps, was indeed a factor in deciding to migrate entirely away from Zope.
I'm a perl5 hacker at heart and intend to continue to be.
The latest version of perl5 is version 12.3, released rather recently.
The websites for both languages now make this clear, but we'll probably need to rename them both to "-something- perl" for people to stop being confused by the names. Maybe in the next year or so.