[lixquid]

That's understandable; if you look at the slides and see all of the integrated features in one big blast, you're going to think "holy moly this was not meant for mortal men".

In a way that's correct, because ultimately Perl6 is designed as the ultimate "kitchen sink" language; it has all the little features you could think of already baked in, which will include a lot of features you won't use.

The main reason for this stems from the overarching design philosophy; "There is more than one way to do something". The language ultimately tries to be as flexible as possible, going so far as to support modification the the core grammar, the object system, etc.

This is meant to make the developer as comfortable as possible, but it can lead the common case of perl-itis, also known as "write-once, read-nonce" code.

[raiph]

Another way to look at it is that it's designed to be a great "babytalk" language, the idea that everyone should be able to relatively easily learn enough of the language to easily get done what they need to easily get done. I'm not saying it's there yet -- doc is critical -- but that's part of the idea.

Conversely, whereas the P5 motto was TIMTOWTDI, the P6 motto is closer to TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE, so there's usually relatively few idiomatic ways to do something.