Self Hosting Guaranteed Long Development

  "Perl 6 is a cleanup of perceived (and keenly felt) mistakes in Perl 5 
and most other mainstream programming languages. I'm not sure you 
understand how deeply those mistakes run."

May be not, but what was clear to me, as soon as I saw the main proposed 
ideas for perl6, was that it would not be done any time soon...

perl was a practical pragmatic choice, it gave access to the C library 
which was an advantage over diddling with shell, and with perl5 a large 
and growing collection of CPAN modules.  The language perl4/5 was not 
exactly small, but tended towards having everything but the kitchen sink 
included... TMTOWTDI became well known for a reason.  Somehow seeing the 
responses here, leans me towards thinking, that the "rethinking 
fundamental assumptions" ought to be done with a tiny, research toy 
language, that could then be fleshed out, for production using the learned 
lessons.

Launching perl6 tainted perl5 with FUD, about the future.  This mattered  
as the size of perl5 script systems was an order of magnitude larger than 
those attempted with perl4.

Depressingly, distro's seem to have moved back to shell scripting, for 
jobs that I *know* from experience on old hardware would run much faster 
and be quicker to code with the relatively self-contained perl4.  Shell 
has  re-asserted itself through ubiquity, and the limitations become 
accepted through familiarity.

Ny comment, was not meant to be critical of the perl porters, nor 
Larry Wall; I intended to point out how ambitious the project was, 
therefore it is not suprising that progress is slow.  Part of me, wanted 
not to rule out "hacking miracles" but my head suspected 2nd System 
Syndrome, OS-370 (read Brooks) style problems, and a very, very long 
development process.