[eritain]

I already spent the hours, so here's a short summary: * Perl 6 is a specification in the form of a test suite. By metonymy, the language it specifies and any implementation that passes the test suite are also called Perl 6. * Perl 6.c is the first stable release of the spec. Later versions will advance through the alphabet: 6.d, 6.e, etc. (6.a and 6.b were release candidates.) * 'Christmas' is the human-friendly name of 6.c. 6.d will be named 'Diwali', and further versions are expected to carry on with names of holidays and celebrations. * Rakudo is the flagship implementation of Perl 6.c. It has monthly releases. For the next few years, I would not expect a feature to be released in a Perl 6 spec until it has been implemented and tested in Rakudo. * Rakudo Star is a distribution that bundles Rakudo and a library. It has monthly releases close on the heels of Rakudo. * MoarVM is one of the runtimes that Rakudo can use. It is custom-built for Rakudo, is developed in the Rakudo project, and is installed whenever you install Rakudo. Rakudo can also run on the Java Virtual Machine. A port to the V8 Javascript engine is underway. * Not Quite Perl 6, or NQP, is a language you probably don't need to know, but which you might hear about. It is approximately a subset of Perl 6 -- the features that are useful for writing compilers and not too tricky to implement. Where Rakudo is not written in Perl 6, it is written in NQP. This way, most bug fixes, optimizations, and new features can be implemented only once, not once for each runtime, and porting Rakudo to a new runtime mostly consists of porting NQP and then bootstrapping.

But yeah, I'm still a lot more comfortable in Perl 5 too.