Perl Creator Hints at Imminent Perl 6 Release

“In his annual “State of the Onion” speech at the O’Reilly Open
Source Conference (OSCON), Perl creator Larry Wall hinted that the
long-awaited version 6 of the Perl programming language might
finally be released soon. He also ruminated about the effect that
Perl 6 would have, once it is released.

“The running joke Wall has about Perl 6, an ambitious update to
the language that has been in development for over a decade, is
that it will be out “by Christmas.” The punch line is that he
doesn’t say Christmas of which year.

“With his State of the Onion keynote talk, an annual
presentation that charts the progress of the Perl community, Wall
usually reiterates this joke. But in this year’s talk, held at the
OSCON conference being held in Portland Oregon this week, he subtly
dropped hints that a workable version of Perl 6 might be available
soon. He noted that Perl 6 “pretty near does exist,” even if it
“still runs very slowly … and has lots of bugs,” he said.”

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