"intuitions" have nothing to do with it ... you simply aren't knowledgeable about programming languages and their history. Perl 6 looks more like Perl 5 than Perl 5 looked like Perl 4, and the same goes for the earlier versions of Perl, as well as FORTRAN, Modula, Simula, Algol, and other languages with numbers in their names. These numbers are not simply release or version numbers.