"I know that a lot of people are nervous about Perl 6, but they shouldn't be. ... The only real downside I see to Perl 6 is that it likely won't be out until late 2003 or 2004."

Because 13 years later, they still won't have to worry about it. Here we are in 2015. But why worry about when Perl 6 is going to finally someday be released? We have changed so much as an industry in the past 13 years. I myself have had ZERO need for the features that Perl 6 would have provided over this decade, instead I find the need for continuous delivery. Git, Jenkins, perlbrew, vagrant, AWS ... these are the tools of the future.