I’ve been at the Open Source Developers Conference for the last couple of days. Late this afternoon Adam Kennedy made two major announcements about Perl:

1. The first Perl 6 distribution (it’s still Beta) was created at 5am this morning. A CD with the distribution burnt on it was presented to Larry Wall who was the keynote speaker on Thursday. Just prior to the announcement he said the beta would be publicly available later this month with the final Perl 6 expected at Christmas 2009.
2. Microsoft is providing hosted access to all supported versions of Windows for everyone with an @cpan.org address so they can test their modules.