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.
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.
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.
When you have advantages that often come down to "it works great on a teletype over 150 baud" (read, compressed syntax, regex, etc) you will eventually be beaten by something that is easier to read at a glance.
Non-programmers read python and sometimes even Java and say "huh, this is something that could be figured out" - reading perl was reading line noise.
APL is probably one of the most powerful languages out there, but the characters in the syntax scare most away.
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.