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Perl 6 has been around for years now. You can even run it in a browser if you're too stupid to operate synaptic.

This is version 14 of Perl 5. It is a major release. (Perl 6 is a new language)

Stability? Maturity?

Basically, this page has a large and scary list of stuff that's not done yet, but is in the basic language spec. It's also pretty clear they're nowhere near 1.0.

I admit, that's much farther along than any Perl6 was last I checked, but contrast to, say, JRuby, which is in version 1.4, has access to tons of Java libraries (Does Rakudo connect me to Perl5 libraries from CPAN?), and is, in general, actually production-ready.

... none that I know of actually feature any kind of ahead-of-time compilation, even to bytecode.

Parrot does, and thus so does Rakudo Perl 6.

'The other question is that there are no implementations of the standard yet...'

The Rakudo guys have now committed themselves to a useful/usable release (if not a complete implementation of everything in the standard) in Spring 2010 (the target is April):

http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411

They intend this to be a release which 'application writers will feel comfortable enough to start using in their projects'.

This probably helped:

http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/05/tpf_receives_large_donation_in.html

Here's where they are now:

http://rakudo.org/status

http://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/master/docs/ROADMAP

While you're being adventurous and testing Perl 5.11.0 I also suggest trying a Perl 6 implementation. Rakudo Perl (running on the Parrot VM) is one of the most actively developed right now. Not as solid as Perl 5.X yet, but certainly getting there.

Perl 6 never really got finished. There is the Rakado version which is close...
http://rakudo.org/status
Eh...
I see perl most often in either legacy site or for system administrator tools (as a replacement for Bash scripts).

There is Perl 6 release each month.

Complaining about the long wait for Perl 6 is so 2003!

In the mean time the core Perl developers have been busy designing and building the programming language (and runtime environment) of the future.

2009 is the year to start getting excited about Perl 6 again!

For anyone paying attention, things have been really starting to come together in the last year.
- Parrot is nearing 1.0 production release (in March 2009)!
- Perl 6 on Parrot (Rakudo) works and gets new features added every day (see recent note saying "now passing 765 more tests than two weeks ago")

There is nothing dead about Perl 6 apart from public opinion (which will change).

TPF grants just reinforce the commitment that is there to push ahead with the vision that is Perl.

Most people may have abandoned Perl for more fashionable languages at the moment, but when there is a shiny new Perl 6, the crowds will return (and Ruby will be looking quite old-skool).

I predict that the extra effort that has gone into designing Perl 6 will pay dividends 10 fold, with the language being a major player for the next 50 year (instead of 5).

Go Perl 6 !!!

Complaining about the long wait for Perl 6 is so 2003!

In the mean time the core Perl developers have been busy designing and building the programming language (and runtime environment) of the future.

2009 is the year to start getting excited about Perl 6 again!

For anyone paying attention, things have been really starting to come together in the last year.
- Parrot is nearing 1.0 production release (in March 2009)!
- Perl 6 on Parrot (Rakudo) works and gets new features added every day (see recent note saying "now passing 765 more tests than two weeks ago")

There is nothing dead about Perl 6 apart from public opinion (which will change).

TPF grants just reinforce the commitment that is there to push ahead with the vision that is Perl.

Most people may have abandoned Perl for more fashionable languages at the moment, but when there is a shiny new Perl 6, the crowds will return (and Ruby will be looking quite old-skool).

I predict that the extra effort that has gone into designing Perl 6 will pay dividends 10 fold, with the language being a major player for the next 50 year (instead of 5).

Go Perl 6 !!!

Perl 6 is supposedly coming out ...someday.

The next stable release of Rakudo (Perl 6 in Parrot) comes out next Tuesday. This will be the 24th stable monthly release of Perl 6 on Parrot in a row. You can also see daily Rakudo spectest progress, if you like.

If I've understood it correctly, Perl 6 will be able to call library functions directly, without a lot of fuss.

Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) can do this now.

Patrick Michaud wrote a bare-bones Python implementation in eight hours. It doesn't support all of Python, but it supports a large amount -- and, to my knowledge, he'd never implemented a Python compiler or interpreter before. That project, Pynie, has languished for a while, as he's spending more time working on Rakudo (the Perl 6 implementation on Parrot), but it's a viable port just waiting for someone to work on it. Lua is functionally complete as of 5.1 (I believe), and Tcl, PHP, and Ruby are in progress.

You can play with the latest versions of all of these languages on Tuesday, 21 October, when we make our next monthly stable release (though partcl just moved to a separate repository, so you can check out the current version there on a different schedule).

and you end up with really ugly code that isn't very maintainable

Why? I've written plenty of OOP Perl, and it's no more or less maintainable than any other language. Well, assuming you aren't a moron, anyway.

The problem with the Perl 5 implementation of OOP is that the programmers sees all the OOP plumbing (the fact that an object is (usually) a hash).
However this is fixed by Moose.pm (a Perl 5 module) and Perl 6.

You can follow the development of Rakudo, the implementation of Perl 6 on the Parrot virtual machine, on www.rakudo.org. Not yet ready for general use, but already good enough to discover the language.

[Python and Ruby] make releases like clockwork...

Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) is part of the monthly Parrot release cycle. We've released a new stable version of Rakudo with Parrot every month since November 2006 -- including a new version yesterday.

[Perl 6] has been threatening to obsolete Perl 5 for nearly a decade now, without actually ever materializing.

We released a new version of Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot) only yesterday, just as we do on the third Tuesday of every month.

After 7 years, I suspect this covers the entire Perl6 development team too.

I can't tell if your comment here is supposed to be approving perserverence or chiding stubborness, but in any case, the perl 6 development effort has achieved some notable successes over the years (and few, if any, members of the team have been working soley on perl 6...).

Off the top of my head:

• Many Perl 6 concepts were implemented as perl 5 modules, and some have become core features in perl 5.10
• Pugs: reference implementation of perl 6 implemented in haskell
• Perl 6 on Parrot (now called Rakudo continues to progress...
• Simon Cozens is impressed with the state of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit: "Parrot lets you implement your own languages using Perl 6 rules for the grammar and Perl 6 for the compiler."