Argh!!!! Okay, I spent over half an hour writing a reply to this node, and then my computer shut down and restarted on me for no reason after I'd typed a heck of a lot (including a sample of code that showed what I hope Perl never looks like). Anyhow, I'll shortly sum up what I had before...

For starters, I make no claims at having read enough of the content regarding the subjct of Perl 6. I've glanced at a few of the new/modified features, such as the perl 6 regex scheme, which (from what I've seen) scares the heck out of me. So if you are an enthusiast about Perl 6 and think I'm dissing Perl 6, don't take me too seriously. I'm much too ignorant about the subject in order to provide a solid foundation on which to base my personal opinion as being more than that: a personal opinion on my current knowledge. I suspect this may also be batkins problem. I wonder if he is well-informed of the changes to the language, or if he's just afraid of what he has read/heard. As for me, I plan to read up more on it soon, so as not to be so ignorant. Besides, I'd much rather be prepared for the new stuff rather than being surprised when it is released!

I support a new version of perl (especially one that the perl community is rebuilding), but have a couple of concerns. First of all, backwards-compatability. Will Perl 6 be 100% entirely compatable with perl 5.6.1+ scripts? (I chose 5.6.1 because of popularity). Will I be able to run perl 5 scripts with perl 6? Or will I have to spend hours working on porting it over? Even more importantly, how will modules be affected? Will they all have to be rewritten in perl 6 code before they can even be used?

Second, I assume (yes, assuming is bad), that the majority (if not all), of the people rewriting perl are perl/system gurus. This makes me fear that the simplest of tasks will be difficult for a newcomer to the language to execute. To further explain, a new implementation in Perl 6 might seem like the easiest of tasks for one of these gurus, but will puzzle and frustrate newcomers to no end, perhaps making them give up one the language and turn to one of its competitors.

And just a very shortened example of what perl had better never look like. I'm not scared perl will turn out to be like this... I did this more for entertainment than for truth! I just made this up... no language is this ugly :) :

#--include module Perl8 export('declare', 'print',
                               'new', 'call',
                               'str', 'int');
#--include module CGI   export(':standard');

sub main::main {
  declare lexical q as scalar;
  q = new Object ( Package => CGI, Method => 'new' );

  print { SRC => STDOUT, BUFFER => int(0) },
    call( Object  => q,
          Method  => header
          Params  => str(text/html) ),
    str(Hi there, this is a sample CGI script);
}
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