it's never too early to start learning perl 6.

yes, the design phase of perl 6 has settled down quite a bit. as larry likes to say, "we're done with the first 80%, and well into the second 80%." at this point, language design changes usually occur in response to issues encountered when implementing the language; for example earlier this year some revisions were made to regexes (S05) which vastly simplified implementation by removing a number of special cases, and removing the need for the 'return' statetment in the regex engine.

the synopses are living documents, whereas apocalypses and exegeses are historical. the synopses are canonical; we base our tests and implementations on these documents, so they're a good resource for learning perl 6. there are other resources too, including tutorials, articles, wiki pages, and documentation, and i'll try to get some links for you soon.

building parrot is simple. releases are available on cpan, but we recommend getting the latest code from subversion since the pace of development is rapid. it's as easy as 'perl Configure.pl && make all test'. we don't recommend installing parrot at this time, but would appreciate any help we can get in making that process work better. building perl6 on parrot is just as easy: 'cd languages/perl6 && make all test'.

parrot has a glossary for many of these terms ('docs/glossary.pod',) but it's not up-to-date to include all those you mentioned.