I remember feeling around 2000 that the whole thing was an exercise in deliberate esotericism, rather than about making something useful and then trying to get people to use it; with the strange terms - synopses, apocalypses, and later Rakudo, Rakudo Star, and so on. Some years ago I recall reading that the main Perl 6 implementation at the time was being worked on part-time by one person, and that seemed like amazing evidence that the project was doomed (1). What project has one person working on it part-time years after its start and ends up succeeding? (Feel free to take my feelings about this with a grain of salt, since I only used Perl on one project, way back around 1997, and never much cared for it.)

[1] Some Googling indicates that the project I'm thinking of is Pugs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs