That's pretty much the way I feel. When I read the Apocalypses (I read them both before reading either Exegesis), I must admit I was almost disgusted. The one thing I've grown so very fond of in Perl is the relation between %hash, @hash{@list} and $hash{$scalar}. My world broke down when I read that this is going away.

But then, though I wasn't around then, I imagine that when people went from Perl 4 to Perl 5, they must have found themselves in an odd world too.

That is what I think it's going to be like to move from Perl 5 to Perl 6. Perl 6 will have its own idioms. We will all have to change the way we think and get accustomed to them. For what price? Well - I doubt anyone would nowadays say things were better, back in Perl 4, without all the newfangled stuff.

Perl 6 is going to have newfangled stuff as well - I predict that eventually we'll get used to it and will look down on Perl 5 as an inferior stepstone from the past, the same way we look down on Perl 4 now even if we remember it fondly.

The hyper operators are one of the things I also am every excited about. Part of Perl I immediately fell in love with is map and grep. Now come to think about them - aren't they are basically "poor man's hyper operators"? And guess what - we will have dinner with silver cutlery in the future.