I must admit, I thought Perl 5 was "good enough" and didn't really want to spend the time to figure out perl 6.
Then I saw Matt Diephouse's Presentation on Perl 6
All the pure OO guys who want intutive OO syntax, run time type information, templating, strict type checking and structured exception handling? It's in there.
All the perl purists who want nothing to do with types, exception handling or required OO syntax? ... well, it's in there.
Want a "Switch" Statement? You can have something better: given/when.
Want typed paramteres? It's in there. Don't want typed paramteres? It's in there.
Simply put, Perl 6 provides the features of C++ or Java that OO people "need", but doesn't require them.
Of course, some lady with a resturant has been saying that since the perl 6 project started, but it took more than 5 minutes for me to "get it".
IMHO, the biggest problem with perl 6 is marketing. Instead of calling it "P6/P" I think it should be called "P6EE." And the parrot runtime should have a fancy name like "The e-CLR" (The Extensible Common Language Runtime). With a few more bells and whistles, we might even be able to the get the pointy-haired-boss crowd ...
Sadly, Unlike Dr. Maher, that forces me to ask the question "Hey, are we really sure we want the pointed haired boss crowd?"
That one is going to take some thinking.
I once commented about the same thing on Perl Monks, and got some good suggestions.
The reply from particle in that thread seems prophetic now. If he'd spelled it "ponie" I would've been shocked.
