Then again, continuing to add backward-compatible changes to Perl 5 would have made it an even bigger pile of mud than it already is. Its refusal to make backward-incompatible changes is both the reason why Perl 5 was so ubiquitous and why it's so very ugly. So I can certainly understand the desire to start afresh with 6, in spite of the costs in terms of adoption.

It does seem like take-up has been low so far, but it's probably still too early to call whether it will turn out to have been the right choice.

I'm less familiar with Python, so can't really comment on there, but it does seem that Python 2.7 had fewer egregious faults than Perl 5.