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Quote from Larry Wall's keynote on YAPC::Europe 2011:

Perl 6 is our best guess at what Perl 5 ought to evolve into if we had 50 years to do it.

(This is from a snapshot on flickr, thank you kawanet.)

I was not there, but I reckon this underlines what we have come to accept for some time now, that Perl 6 is not an upcoming bugfix release of Perl 5 but something rather different, and quite experimental in nature.

The emphasis on evolution, however, makes me wonder if we are likely to see certain changes in "traditional" Perl any time soon, that make it a better language by removing out-dated features such as bareword behaviour, obscure magic punctuation variables, and the like. A major version number increase might have sufficiently alerted programmers to cope with non-compatible changes, but since "6.*" is now taken, there seems to be no elegant route out of this nicely paint-surrounded corner.

I'd suggest to go for 5<<1 when it can't be 5+1 anymore. Welcome to Perl 10.

Perl 6 fans, don't get angry with me, your language will remain to be greater than that:

perl -le 'print "ok" if "Perl 6" gt "Perl 10"'
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In reply to Next Big Step for Perl 5 by martin

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