I&#x27;m a guy with a Camel tattoo who found Ruby and never went back to Perl, but have followed Perl 6 out of nostalgia. Here&#x27;s the answers as I understand them:<p><pre><code>  - Version 6.c? Why not 6.0?
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This is first, a reflection of the playfulness of Perl, and second, a statement about language design. The first release, an alpha, was 6.a. The second, a beta, was 6.b. The third, the actual &#x27;final&#x27; release, was 6....c? Since it was being released on Christmas, and &#x27;c&#x27; fits, it was decided that releases of Perl 6 would be named after holidays, and they went back and found them for A and B too.<p>As for the statement about language design, I&#x27;ll add that onto the next one, as it makes more sense in that context.<p><pre><code>  - What&#x27;s with the whole &quot;language&quot; and &quot;compiler&quot; distinctions no one cares about?
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&quot;Perl 6&quot; is a _language_, not an _implementation_. There&#x27;s a language spec, and any implementation of this spec is a Perl 6. This is a distinction that a lot of projects make, but is a lot fuzzier, because they don&#x27;t have specs. Consider Ruby: yes, JRuby is also a Ruby, but since there&#x27;s no language spec, people still assume MRI when you say &quot;Ruby&quot;. Perl people don&#x27;t want you to assume Rakudo when discussing the language itself.<p>This is why there&#x27;s no minor version of &quot;Perl 6&quot;. Language specifications change a lot less frequently than compilers.<p><pre><code>  - Why is the first stable release of the compiler not optimized to the max?
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Like most projects, as long as performance is Good Enough, it&#x27;s good to get people start using it, and then work on performance after. Especially for a language where performance isn&#x27;t a main goal, like Perl. As long as you haven&#x27;t painted yourself into a corner with language decisions, performance improvement is refinement work.<p><pre><code>  - Is there a need for a new Perl? What is it good for?
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I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s a _need_, but Perl 6 sure improves on a ton of things about Perl 5. It&#x27;s the stuff that makes Perl Perl, but turned up to 22, not just 11.<p>The last two are questions I can&#x27;t really answer.