The travesty known as "Perl 6" ignored that, and so it was ignored.
No, Mike. That wasn't the problem.
The problem is that it went for 15 years without any substantive release, and what was eventually released wasn't worth migrating to.
(Yes, I am aware of the first Rakudo Star. No, it doesn't count. No, I don't want to debate this with the gish galloper gallery.)
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Perhaps what we really need to do is to declare that Perl forks along major versions, and that each major version is effectively a separate language, which was the stated intent with Perl 6. The catch is that Perl 5 was "good enough" to become very deeply entrenched in wide use. A later release is unlikely to be able to displace it, except, perhaps, by sabotaging the continued development of Perl 5, but we should be able to learn from the repeated disasters that PHP incurred when they did that with PHP 5 and PHP 7. A "Go 7" campaign trying to kill off Perl 5 as PHP did with "Go 5" to kill off PHP 4 is more likely to destroy Perl's continued viability entirely than it is to succeed.
(And PHP's "Go 5" campaign still did not really work — at the time, I was working at a small ISP that still provided Web host services. Know what we did about "Go 5"? We ended up keeping an ancient and long out-of-support server running to keep our customers' existing PHP 4 sites operational. All that obsoleting PHP 4 did was cause us to keep a server running at least half a decade past its "replace-by" date. We would migrate customers to the new server at no charge if they asked for a newer runtime or something other than PHP.)
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