The most reassuring sentence of A6 IMHO is

You're not expected to understand all of that yet.

;-) Some of the syntax Larry presents looks quite frightening, but it is good to remind yourself that a lot of it is optional. I guess for 80% of bread-and-butter scripts, we're going to use 20% of the material in A6. But it is good to see that Perl 6 will allow me to write anything from Lispish to C++-ish code.

I admit that I haven't followed the process behind parrot too closely. But I am getting the impression now that Perl 6 is strongly headed towards becoming a general-purpose language, like C/C++/Java. The two most important indicators for that are IMHO code optimization and JIT compilation in parrot (see python bet :)) and detailed type system and subroutine signatures in Perl 6 (which means that "XS" will probably directly be implemented in Perl 6). Of course, at the same time, Perl 6 tries to cover niches as well, for example with it's new regex syntax.

Am I too hopeful in assuming that the Perl 6/Parrot guys are actually creating something that will be in many areas as fast and flexible as the abovementioned languages or better? Will we be writing KDE apps, kernel-mode drivers, COM objects and web browsers in Perl 6? Or is this something so blatantly obvious I should have noticed it a long time ago?

Let me restate my original thought: The one thing that really excites and keeps me from despairing when seeing all that syntax is that essentially, Perl 6 will still be a simple language. You'll be able to use just what you need, just like with Perl 5. I like that.