[ars]

What are the risks still left? What things might happen/not happen that would prevent release on this schedule?

Or in other words what is still left to do that is not just routine work, but actually might not be possible (or not possible in the timeframe)?

Or in even more informal language, what's the holdup? :)

[xaa]

I'm also interested in an answer to this question. Perl 6, as a feature set, looks awesome and I'd really consider replacing my use of Python with it, espcially because of the gradual typing and fast startup time (assuming Perl 6 follows Perl 5 in this regard; my initial experiments haven't been encouraging though).

In general, I think there's huge latent demand for a relatively fast, "next-gen" scripting language, as even Python is showing its age in terms of the programming styles it doesn't support, and has no plans to.

Will it really be released by the end of this year? Obviously the history of this project induces a healthy bit of skepticism. My two cents would be that the dev team should just release it next week and fix the inevitable warts gradually.

On a related note, should I, as someone who does not know Perl, bother learning Perl 6 yet? Or is it likely to change a lot before release?

[SrslyJosh]

> On a related note, should I, as someone who does not know Perl, bother learning Perl 6 yet? Or is it likely to change a lot before release?

I don't think so. Everything I've read in recent years has indicated that the grammar is stable, which implies that the operators and planned feature set are also stable.

If you want to melt your brain, you can take a look at STD.pm6, the official grammar for Perl 6, which is also written in Perl 6:

https://github.com/perl6/std/blob/master/STD.pm6

Recent changes seem to be very minor.

[ab5tract]

Just to clarify, as you responded "I don't think so" to two questions, the language is not going to change too significantly prior to release, so yes you should bother learning Perl 6. No one I've met who has actually bother to use the language has had anything but excitement about it.

[perlgeek]

As always in open source projects, there's the risk that a major contributor might drop out.

Barring that, there are three major technical things we want to tackle before the release: native, shaped arrays (compact storage of arrays/matrices of machine-sized types), the Great List Refactoring (GLR; mostly about speeding up list iteration and making things more consistent), and some Unicode-related tasks.

Any of those might prove more difficult than expected. I personally see the biggest risk in the list refactoring, because lists are rather central to the language as a whole.