This is a prediction, not an official announcement.

Regardless of wildly inaccurate estimates, statements that it will be released "when it's done", and other potentially contradicting statements about the ultimate release date of Perl 6, I'm pretty sure I know it's coming out soon. Specifically, within the next 18 months. Vaporware no more. I mean at least a release candidate, if not a real true-to-life production release.

My method of prediction is simple: Both my Debian and FreeBSD systems report Perl 5.8.8 as their installed Perl versions. They've been that way for a while now. Perl 5.x is rapidly approaching the point where the numbers will start to look silly. The experimental developer's release is apparently 5.9.4 currently. I figure these numbers give it about 18 months to get to the point where the impending silliness must be avoided by incrementing the first digit.

Really, now, we can't have something like Perl 5.16.4 -- can we? What would the other languages think? We should have a Perl 6 in our hands in about eighteen months, come hell or high water, even if it must be accomplished by ensuring complete Parrot support for Ruby 2.0 and providing a translation layer so your Perl 6 syntax gets translated into Ruby before being turned into bytecode. Yeah, I don't foresee it happening that way either -- it's just a crazy idea.

Yep. 18 months. Who wants to bet on it?

print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
 - apotheon
CopyWrite Chad Perrin

In reply to Perl 6 coming out in 18 months(?) by apotheon

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