> My main problem with Perl 6 is that it seems overly large and complex. It is very different from Perl 5 Perl 5 is also overly large and complex (with most fe

> My main problem with Perl 6 is that it seems overly large and complex. It is very different from Perl 5 Perl 5 is also overly large and complex (with most features getting used only rarely and some being broken/having half-assed implementations), only not as scary because it doesn't get presented to the newbie with its radically new features first. For example, did you know Perl 5 has a UNITCHECK compile phase keyword? Almost noone uses it. Did you know that you can execute code inside a regular expression with (?{ CODE })? It's very useful but too bad that using other regular expressions in the code you use/call from there will break things silently. It's such things that a) made the implementation of Perl 5 already overly complex (and progressing slowly) and b) made things harder for the Perl ecosystem to fully support the language (even parsing Perl to analyze it, like Perl::Critic does, is nearly impossible). Instead of addressing these issues and slimming down the Perl 5 spec to a useful, easier to maintain, optimize and learn core functionality (and perhaps giving it a name that doesn't imply backwards compatibility), they built another large, incompatible mess. We'll see how well Perl 6 does out in the wild.