Alas, then can the apocalypse on REs. My eyes glazed over about 4-5 pages in. I came away with a feeling of "why", but I know all the world's not ASCII -- I can play nicely with others". :-) Nothing's perfect, I could live with it.

The came the next ones throwing stuff at me which I have trouble imagining good uses for, lazy evaluation would be a good example of that. Then came the trait stuff. Then the function and object changes. And don't get me going on about the new "<<" and ">>" operators; or changing "." to "_" (I understand why on this last one I just think that "_" was a really bad replacement).

Yes, we need some change in the object area, and a few other small changes in other areas; but on the whole, Perl 5 is a good and functional language (minus those few warts. :-) If you have a decent Unix background, it's a snap to pick up, quite powerful, and noone has a resource like CPAN. It is by far my favorite language!

If I had to summarize my misgivings about Perl 6, it would probably be that it's too much change too quickly. In a weak moment, I might also say there's a lot of new stuff going into it just so that people can say their language does "these cool things". As I read about the language now, I do NOT want to use Perl 6.

Parrot seems very useful, I hope Dan & company continue making good progress; I think they'll make it. The Ponie seems like a excellent thing. Perl 6 excites me negatively -- nothing personal against Larry & the gang whom still hold in highest regards (everyone's allowed the ocassional mistake).

I'm also afraid that enough others will feel like this and either stop contributing to CPAN or else the number of duplicate modules in there will increase significantly. I hope this doesn't happen; but what choice will we have we when need a module, and we're in Perl 5 (or at least P5 compatibllity mode if I'm forced to use P6) and there's only a P6 module using stuff that truely looks like line noise? I'll have to re-invent that module, add my changes to it, then instead of contributing them back to the author, they'll be checked in as a new module. Again, I hope I'm wrong about this.