* Perl 6 * Raku * Raku Perl 6
and we're told to, "Pick the one that works the best for you and use it consistently". And don't forget there's,
Rakudo, a compiler for Perl 6 -aka- Rakudo Perl 6 Compiler
If you wanna rename things, fine - just do it, don't do this halfsies thing. Don't make the name collide with something else, especially in a very related project.
Actually, the more I think about it, using "Rakudo (the language formerly known as Perl 6)" as a descriptor would probably do the best job encapsulating what it is succinctly. It was a continuation of Perl, but now it's its own thing. As opposed to "Perl 6", which doesn't really convey how radically different it is.
I'm not really one of the "Perl 5 needs to reclaim the Perl 6 name" camp, even though I'm a full time Perl developer and have been for close to two decades. Perl 5 will do what Perl 5's going to do, and freeing up the Perl 6 name won't help all that much with that (it's not like there's enough changes worth making a Perl 7 from, and a purely marketing driven name change would just be laughed at). It might actually be more beneficial to Perl 6.
Is it still useful? Damn right it is, but there's not going to be a Perl 5++.
Speaking as someone who's been writing Perl since oh, 1997 or so. So another multi-decader (and no plans of stopping) - where do we all meet? At the bar?
Now, I'll concede the point regarding language design though: the Perl 5 Porters have become very conservative wrt language evolution. I used to be highly skeptical of this (I convinced folks of strict by default in 5.12 and oh how much I lobbied behind the scenes for fully @_ eschewing function signatures!) but since we made a number of blunders in such changes in the decade prior, I understand the conservativism.
The idea of extending things via modules in Perl 5 was a great one, but there's a limit on what you can without features guaranteed to be in core. I also get the idea that keeping the core small is probably a good one (by not shipping every module in the world), and keeping the language opinionated (by letter you select just what type of meta-object system you want, but after a while, it doesn't seem like these things help with architecting a future for the core language.
So it goes, I suppose.
It is doubtful this will ever be backported into the official distribution, because $drama...