So, like probably many people, I was very hyped about Perl 6 in the early 2000s, followed the mailing lists and so forth, but became disappointed and stopped caring when it became painfully clear that there had been no net progress for a decade.
So please excuse my skepticism, because I'm still fascinated by Perl 6's ideas and potential. But is this another "Rakudo Star" where they just take whatever current mess they have and label it "release", or is Perl 6 really finally ready now?
Just to clarify, what happens at Christmas is the first proper language release (as specified by the test suite) that will be accompanied by a conforming compiler release, ie the main focus is still semantics, not 'production readiness'.
That said, Rakudo of today is more usable than Rakudo of days gone by, though there are still issues (my personal pet peeve: parsing speed; hopefully, automatic precompilation will land in the not-too-distant future, which, would mitigate the problem).
Thanks for the clarification. So what does it mean to release "a language"? Is there a specification in addition to the test suite? Is the specification frozen from that point on? Or will it change, but only in backwards compatible ways?
The test suite is the actual specification; for the language release, it will be cleaned up of things that aren't yet ironed out.
The design documents at http://design.perl6.org/ are companion documents to the test suite, but where the two are in conflict, the test suite is authoritative.
As for changes: backward incompatible changes will result in a new language version.
I keep wondering the same, especially when perl.org mentions nothing about Perl 6. It would be really nice if they showed some sort of sign there about Perl 6. Instead all we get is Perl 5.
So please excuse my skepticism, because I'm still fascinated by Perl 6's ideas and potential. But is this another "Rakudo Star" where they just take whatever current mess they have and label it "release", or is Perl 6 really finally ready now?