"Mega language popularity"[1] is largely driven by boom-and-bust fads, my friend, as well as cultural artifacts like word-of-mouth -- and the number of people who generally make any language decisions about them based on minute details like you're implying is a vanishingly small one, in my experience.
I'd even go further and say that, in my experience, your mind is likely already decided, as well as the minds of many others, when it comes to choices like this. Whether or not they renamed Perl 5 to Perl 7 or whatever is not really going to make a difference in the long run and no perceptible marketing changes will change that to you... People on places like this website already like to talk about other examples such as how "Ruby and Rails are dead" despite them still being immensely popular and widely used today still... Their mind is decided well before any actual facts of the matter come up, even if Rails has more open bug-reports than they have users. No amount of new marketing will change it meaningfully, because much of the decision is driven by cultural aesthetics, and aesthetically, it's just not cool anymore. We're all prone to it, and unfortunately, it is not always a fully rational or predictable path, either.
Some amount of marketing matters for software projects, a lot of it in fact. But at some point you have to call a spade a spade, and decide when you're just chasing meaningless fads for something that won't happen, based on technical marketing alone.
[1] Which is almost exclusively what everyone 'means' when they talk about this sort of branding/marketing stuff, if you asked me as a FOSS developer. Nobody can ever conceptualize "successful, accomplished, and with a healthy life", because by every measure Perl is a wild success in all these metrics, beyond what most software could ever dream of -- they can only conceptualize "total failure" AKA "dead language" and "wildly successful beyond all measure in all circumstances, forever".
I'd even go further and say that, in my experience, your mind is likely already decided, as well as the minds of many others, when it comes to choices like this. Whether or not they renamed Perl 5 to Perl 7 or whatever is not really going to make a difference in the long run and no perceptible marketing changes will change that to you... People on places like this website already like to talk about other examples such as how "Ruby and Rails are dead" despite them still being immensely popular and widely used today still... Their mind is decided well before any actual facts of the matter come up, even if Rails has more open bug-reports than they have users. No amount of new marketing will change it meaningfully, because much of the decision is driven by cultural aesthetics, and aesthetically, it's just not cool anymore. We're all prone to it, and unfortunately, it is not always a fully rational or predictable path, either.
Some amount of marketing matters for software projects, a lot of it in fact. But at some point you have to call a spade a spade, and decide when you're just chasing meaningless fads for something that won't happen, based on technical marketing alone.
[1] Which is almost exclusively what everyone 'means' when they talk about this sort of branding/marketing stuff, if you asked me as a FOSS developer. Nobody can ever conceptualize "successful, accomplished, and with a healthy life", because by every measure Perl is a wild success in all these metrics, beyond what most software could ever dream of -- they can only conceptualize "total failure" AKA "dead language" and "wildly successful beyond all measure in all circumstances, forever".