Oh Glorious, Esteemed and Enlightened Monks!

I dearly hope I do not offend anybody with what may well be a question that quickly exposes my naivete with things Perl.

I have recently embarked on my journey to Perl enlightenment, and I am curious about the state of Perl 6. I have looked over (what I think is) the official Perl 6 website and the Wikipedia entry. I also did a quick PerlMonks search of the topic and found a small handful of hits the most recent of which was posted way back in 2005. This seems odd to me as I would have guessed there would be a reasonable level of enthusiasm for the general state of this ongoing effort.

My question is really what IS the state of Perl 6? I am wondering if I should be spending significant effort learning Perl 6 or leave it alone, let it mature, and work on my Perl 5.x.x foo. I have a reasonable amount of ruby and python experience, and my general understanding is that part of the Perl 6 plan is to adopt some ideas from such languages (revamped object models and such?). So the idea of focusing on learning the next generation of Perl that might feel a little more familiar has some appeal.

Also, I understand there are a couple of different development implementations of Perl 6...Rakudo/Parrot and Pugs. Is this in fact the case? And is there a reason to work with one or the other?

Many, many happy regards, or wonderous Monks!
Scott

In reply to Perl 6 by tswall

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.