There is no Perl 7. Perl 5 has been having releases the whole time you've been doing Ruby. Each minor release of Perl 5 since 5.10 had major features comparable to Python 2 to 3 but with full backwards compatibility. Perl 6 is a whole new language. There is no plan for a Perl 7 instead like Smalltalk and friends Perl 6 will just endlessly bootstrap itself to the next generation with its MOP and grammar engine.