hope we'll all be proud of what Perl is becoming. And ready to get back to the keyboard for 5.12, for which, I hope, we'll not wait as long as we waited for 5.10.

I personally believe that we can ask perl for an estimate:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Date::Parse;
use Statistics::LineFit;

my $lf=Statistics::LineFit->new;
$lf->setData([4,6,8,10], [map str2time($_), split /\n/ => <<'.EOD']);
13 Jun 1997
22 Mar 2000
18 Jul 2002
18 Dec 2007
.EOD

my ($i,$s)=$lf->coefficients;
print "Perl 5.12 estimated release date: " . localtime($i+$s*12), "\n"
+;

__END__
[download]

Of course, anyone who both sucks less is better than me at statistics, and knows perl history better than I do, could improve on this. Anyway, I get:

Perl 5.12 estimated release date: Mon Jul  5 13:00:00 2010
[download]