The worry about the time to do Perl 6 is somewhat reminicent of the story of "The Agony and The Ecstacy," when Pope Julius II kept screaming to Michelangelo for years while he was working on the Sistene Chapel: "Buonnarrati, when will you make an end?!" Michelangelo's answer: "When its finished!"

Seriously, though, there is more involved than just the design of the Perl 6 language, there is the design of Parrott and by extension a unified platform for all open-source scripting languages that can put them on an even footing with compiled languages.

As a systems software engineer for 20 years, I expected when Perl 6 and Parrott were announced that the effort would take at least 5 years, and it looks like I was off by a year (Damien Conway now projects Perl 6 completion in 2006). That is about the amount of time it takes to design and develop a new OS/Platform/VM. Microsoft arguably did it in less time with .NET becuase less original design and development was involved (thanks to Java), and the released .NET 1.0 product was far from complete anyway -- in fact, if .NET 2.0 is released in 2005 (one can never be sure with Microsoft) and is mature, it *will* have taken over 5 years!

Perl 6 with Parrott can inherit Perl 5/CPAN (and possibly PHP/PEAR and repositories for Python and Ruby when Parrott implementations are completed) practially from day one! So in a great sense, Perl 6 gets born fully formed!

So from where I'm standing, Perl 6 and Parrott are at PAR, or maybe 1 year over PAR. Now, up and comers like PHP, Python and Ruby have gained ground on Perl 5 (for instance, as measured on Freshmeat) during this period, but if the final design of Perl 6 is great, those stats can change back in Perl 6's favor just as easily.

I'm less worried, because I have faith in the process of open source development as long as the technical direction is good, and right now I'm getting a warm fuzzy from the Perl 6 and Parrott teams.