I thought of a few troll-worthy comments, but then moved on to others. Few things came to me though later that are less abrasive so I guess I'll share these nic

I thought of a few troll-worthy comments, but then moved on to others. Few things came to me though later that are less abrasive so I guess I'll share these nicer sides of my opinion: I don't know if it will be the same for perl6, but at least with perl5, backwards compatibility was rarely broken. Every time my debian-testing box upgraded a ruby version, it broke something. From 1.8,1.9,2.0, and I think 2.1 actually worked without any issues... This is never an issue with perl5. And before you say "perl is dead it never changes", go look on the perl5porters mailing list. There are a ton of changes going on. I had every intent this year to join the dev team, but the commits come in so quick on that mailing list, I can never find a place to start. When perl5 updates to a new version (which has been happening once a year for like 5 years now), it is not just a few bugs that are fixed, but a whole lot of new features are added and plenty of new syntax to scare the heck out of anyone. So an argument of the ruby dev cycle is 'slower' probably won't hold up. Onto more perl6 specifics, I think one of the original goals was perl6 being able to compile a script into a raw binary. Don't know if that feature will be implemented. Ruby can't do that, though it does have the JIT compile stuff. So I guess that could be one reason.. Perl6 is new, so I guess it is full of new "technology and stuff" right? I personally never did much with ruby. I tried to use it as my first language to learn with. I signed up on some hacker forum wanting to learn to hack with my new found ruby skills... They just booted me with the message of "ruby aint really programming". This was back in 2007, but I never could get over that... From then on I only used Ruby when I couldn't figure out how to do something in perl. So none of my ruby scripts have ever been seen by another pair of eyes. I keep them all hidden, knowing that they are cool and all in their own right, but knowing if I were just a little smarter... I could have written it in perl...