Interesting note, deprecated. I'd be very interested to see someone (*cough* TheDamian *cough*) do a comparison of Ruby and the new features in Perl 6. It seems some of the benefits that people list for Ruby are the same as some of those I've heard for Perl 6.

I have to tell you, though, that "it's a cleaned-up Perl" doesn't sell me on the language at all. In my personal experience, that argument has always been bogus. The most glaring example I know of was when, many moons ago, C++ was called a "cleaned-up" C. Around 1993, I had been writing C for several years (and enjoying it), so I learned C++, to the point where I even got paid for writing a class library or two. A few years later, I took another look and recoiled in horror. C++ had become a byzantine, complicated, hodge-podge that completely missed what to me was the strongest point of C: a simple mental model. When I looked at a C program, I felt like I knew what was going on underneath it all. With C++, I had no idea.

Perl leaves me with the same feeling: when I look at a piece of code, I can build a simple mental picture of what's happening (Erudil's code being a glaring exception ;-). What I'm wondering now is which of Perl 6 or Ruby is more likely to make me say, "Oh, I see, how obvious."