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Many languages seem to suffer from legacy support. C++ and PHP for example. The double standard might be the only way to avoid this!?

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The legacy support is a benefit for people who are still using it.

The lesson from both Perl and Python is clear: you cannot remove language features - if you do you're creating a new language which has to start from zero in adoption.

Perl 6 removes very few language features. About the only notable ones I can think of is fork and format. Since Perl 6 has built-in multithreading, fork is not needed. And hardly anyone uses format anymore (it is great for directly printing to a line printer).

What Perl 6 did is change the syntax for various features of Perl 5; while adding a lot of new features.

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