21 years after the debut of Perl 5 and after endless teasing its developers about an upcoming version of the programming language, Larry Wall, creator of Perl, has officially confirmed that the first official release of Perl 6 will launch by the end of the year, around Christmas.
Development for Perl 6 has always been slow and shrouded in mystery, but things seem to have accelerated when Craigslist, one of the largest Perl-powered websites, hired Larry Wall in 2013, and he indicated that he would continue his work on Perl 6.
And while Perl's popularity among new programmers has declined in recent years, with more and more people choosing Ruby, Java, and JavaScript, Perl has never fallen out of Tiobe's TOP-10, and it still provides professionals with decent annual salaries.
Some of the new features announced for Perl 6 include an anonymous state variable, a new control structure for creating lists, an alternative structure for creating loops, and a new active block that runs only when a condition is met.
The announcement was made during a developer conference at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, held on October 5.
The first release of Perl 6 will be available for download from perl6.org. You can see a list of the differences between Perl 5 and Perl 6 here.
