I can't find it right now, but I like how this harks back to the original announcement that Perl 6 would be ready in time for Christmas—just with no commitment to which Christmas.
And at that point they found out that Perl 6 will be a complete rewrite and not just a cleaned up Perl 5. I also guess that the Second System feeling already arrived in some minds, the problem IMO is more that the 'by Christmas' joke has been kept alive for so many years, without specifying a year.
http://use.perl.org/use.perl.org/articled5d3.html?sid=00/07/...