Don't get me wrong, I love Perl 6, I spend most of my spare time maintaining a port of its object system in Perl 5. But lets be realistic, if Perl 6.0.0 comes out in Christmas 200x I will not be rushing to load it onto my production boxes and stake my livelihood on it. This is not beacuse I have no faith in the Perl 6 team, quite the contrary, just that it is an untested language (no, not unit tests, and audreyt deploying Pugs in prod doesn't count) and an untested platform (Parrot). Now Christmas 200(x + 1), thats a different story.
So, with that disclaimer out of the way, I have to say that I am really excited about the developments taking place on p5p regarding the Perl 5.12 features. Perl 5.10 is already got some really nice bits and 5.12 will surely introduce even more, bringing us even closer to the Perl 6 goodness. Yes, yes, even with its infamous jenga internals Perl 5 is still rock solid (it has never done me wrong), and with 16,000,000+ lines of nightmare legacy code (a.k.a. - CPAN) I know it's well tested.
- Stevan
