I normally talk about Perl 5, but many of the ideas and discussions here will apply equally well to Perl 6. (I hope we'll throw out the bad ideas, embrace the good ideas, and make some new mistakes no one has ever made before.)

I have a belief in relentless progress, where a process of thoughtful reflection with frequent feedback and rapid iteration can produce amazing results in a reasonably short period of time. FLOSS projects -- community-driven FLOSS projects, at least -- have a strong advantage in that their progress is public. Sometimes, that progress is very public.

Rakudo's status page features a prominant graph. Near-daily updates of this graph show the relentless progression of Rakudo to passing the complete Perl 6 specification test suite. If you look today (or view a stunning commit to the status graph data, you'll see that Rakudo has jumped from 8444 passing spectests to 10224, out of 15627 spectests. That's a 21% improvement from one day to another.

If the chart isn't reference enough, Rakudo surpassed 7000 (7007, to be precide) passing spectests (out of 15240) on 25 February. That's 3217 passing spectests in six weeks -- new passes 76.5 a day.

Perl 6 has been a project in process -- design and implementations -- for a long time, but as I've said before, I know of no better way to produce great software than in rapid, well-considered iterations with plenty of feedback.