> Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6. I don't agree that

> Perl is all but dead because Larry Wall, Perl's developer, thought it'd be a good idea to let someone else implement his spec for Perl 6. I don't agree that Perl is all but dead, but I agree that one of the bigger contributors to the length of P6's 15 year gestation is quite plausibly Larry holding his tongue and commits in relation to compiler implementation. Fwiw: * According to Larry (a couple weeks ago) the community told him to stay out of compiler implementation at the start of the P6 project. He complied, constraining his P6 toolchain coding to pieces such as the STD grammar/parser. * Late last year Larry said he planned to change that, with his main focus set to be optimizations. And in the last few weeks he has indeed begun landing a stream of commits to Rakudo and MoarVM. (So far his commits mostly relate to Unicode handling, which looks set to be a notable P6 strength, but there have been some significant optimizations too.) * There is a de facto reference implementation: Rakudo/MoarVM.