21 years after the debut of Perl 5 and after endlessly teasing its developers about an upcoming version of the programming language, Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, has officially confirmed that the first official version of Perl 6 will launch by the end of the year, about Christmas.
Growth for Perl 6 has always been slow and cracked with a veil of mystery, but things seem to have accelerated when Craiglist, one of the largest sites operating with Perl, hired Larry Wall for 2013, and said he would continue his work on Perl 6.
And while Perl's popularity among new developers has fallen in recent years, with more and more people choosing Ruby, Java, and JavaScript, Perl never fell outside Tiobe-10 of Tiobe, and continues to provide professionals with decent annual wages.
Some of them new features announced for Rel 6 include an anonymous state variable, a new control structure for creation directories, an alternative structure for creating loops, and a new active block that only runs when a condition is met.
The announcement was made on duration of a developer conference at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum, held on October 5th.
The first version of Verl 6 will be available for download from perl6.org. You can see a list of the differences between Pearl 5 and 6 Pherl here.
