Perl5 by itself is a pretty large open source project as is all the 25,000+ CPAN modules, but you're correct that I'd rather not deal with the Perl5 VM itself a

Perl5 by itself is a pretty large open source project as is all the 25,000+ CPAN modules, but you're correct that I'd rather not deal with the Perl5 VM itself as that is probably very arcane (although I've certainly never tried). That could just be because the language has 30 years of open source patches on it. Perl6 on the other hand was designed to be stupidly easy to get into fixing the Core and VM. Instead of being written in C, it is written in a limited Perl subset "NQP" or "Not Quite Perl" that is much easier to read. They've had several blog posts about tracing an error pack to the source and fixing it. I'm not sure if P6 will continue steaming ahead into a true production language, but i really hope it does as it is so nice.