Yes, but it took so many years of confusing people not deeply familiar with the situation that perl6 will be a better perl5 (as perl5 was a better perl4, perl4 was a better perl3, etc.) while in reality it was a very different beast.
It would've taken 45 seconds of reading wikipedia article to figure out that Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different languages. Java went from 1.4 to 5. With standardized languages like C/C++/etc you have to keep track of not only the toolchain version but also the standard version (like C99/C++11, etc). Programmers routinely keep track of these just fine.
