I've only dabbled with it a bit, but I think of it this way: One could say that at its inception and heyday, Perl more or less defined what a "scripting" langu

I've only dabbled with it a bit, but I think of it this way: One could say that at its inception and heyday, Perl more or less defined what a "scripting" language could/should be, making things like string processing and list/dictionary handling very convenient, mixing multiple paradigms, and facilitating community modules. That certainly seemed to have influenced JS, Ruby, and Python (Perl's scripty siblings) but I think many people would say these are now considered better executions of those core ideas. But are they really the apotheosis of this kind of language? How else could you grow/change a language like this in order to make it more convenient, powerful, or interesting? (Or less politely: what would make something as great as Ruby or Python look relatively blub-ish?) I see Perl 6 as an answer to that question, perhaps in a similar way that one might say Rust answers that question for systems languages.