[dugword]

I'm a huge fan of Perl, and I've been playing around with Perl 6. The transition had been pretty smooth, and other than a few minor syntax changes (e.g. "." for method calls instead of "->") it feels the same.

Having said that, there is a lot more to Perl 6 than what comes baked into Perl 5.

The transition is a lot more like C to C++, where you could just use a C subset and be immediately productive.

Perl 6 has given me basically all the things I wanted changed in Perl 5 (function signatures, everything is an object, built in REPL) plus a whole bunch of stuff I didn't know I wanted but now love (gradual typing, crazy powerful type system, amazing out of box CLI argument parsing).

With Inline::Perl5 you also have access to all of CPAN.

Performance isn't quite there yet, but for the stuff I use it for (one off scripts, reports, personal CLI tools) it's been great.