An old but informative article on Perl 6: http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.html http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.html And a b

An old but informative article on Perl 6: http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.html http://www.perl.com/pub/2006/01/12/what_is_perl_6.html And a brief blurb from the Perl 6 FAQ that helps explain it a bit: > Perl 6 is still a very perlish language, following the same underlying ideas as previous versions (sigils for mini-namespaces, There Is More Than One Way To Do It, caring about both manipulexity and whipuptitude, taking many ideas from natural language (like disambiguation through context)) > Perl 6 code feels very perlish. A Perl 5 program using Moose or a similar object system feels closer to Perl 6 than to Perl 1 code > "Perl" is still a strong brand name, which we don't want to throw away lightly > It is very hard to find a good alternative name. And no, "camelia" and "rakudo" are not good names for a programming language (even if they are fine for our mascot and the leading compiler) > Even if Perl 6 changed its name, an incremental update to Perl 5 likely couldn't claim the version 6, because the name Perl 6 sticks in people's head, and will long be associated with what it is today