I can accept that maybe Perl 6 "exists," as chromatic claims -- but so do countless other experimental languages, in labs and open source projects. At one time Ruby was just such a curiosity. The difference is that a couple of years went by and all of a sudden everyone is abuzz about Ruby. Major Web applications, such as Twitter, are now running (or stumbling) on Ruby. Where's Perl 6?
I fixed at least six bugs in Parrot today (which probably brings me to ten for the week, if not more). You can see my checkins at cia.vc or Ohloh and review the tickets I've closed at rt.perl.org. If Parrot and Perl 6 don't exist, what exactly what I was working on?
But come now -- there's existing and then there's existing. It only took two years to go from version 2.4 of the Linux kernel to version 2.6. That was a pretty significant upgrade, with an awful lot of people relying on that particular piece of software to work, work well, and work consistently. And yet they pulled it off. Further, it took only nine years to go from version 1.0 of the Linux kernel to version 2.6.
Meanwhile, Perl 6 has been in development for eight years, and there's still no production release in sight. And don't tell me there have been lots of upgrades to Perl 5 in the meantime; that might be true, but it doesn't count when everyone's supposed to be planning for an earth-shattering, backward-compatibility-breaking release that promises to be so important that Larry Wall started throwing around the word "apocalypse."
To me, it doesn't matter if there's a binary called Perl 6 that I can execute or not. How can the Perl 6 language not be vaporware if the Perl hacker community can't use it for real-world jobs?
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