One of my favorite sites, Perl Buzz, just pointed me to Kurila, an experimental Perl 5 fork. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I do love to see innovation in the Perl space. Perl 6 has been promised by Christmas, they just won't say what year. I figure 2014. But Perl 6 isn't Perl anyway, it's a new language in (tattered) Perl clothing. Perl 5 marches on in 5.10, though, which keeps me from complaining too much.
On the other hand, I would hate to see Perl stagnate so much that a fork like this actually became a viable alternative for the average Perl developer. Not because the fork is bad code or has bad language implications (on the contrary, I like some of Karila's ideas), but because of what that would mean about the old Perl. Namely, that it started to suck worse than the alternatives.
