[cjfields1]

It's not too far off the mark.

Perl 6 is probably best described as a dialect. The look and design of the language are very Perl-ish, but some of the key sore points from Perl 5 (OO, concurrency, etc) are addressed and it has added a number of killer features. This is not Python 2->32; it is a major overhaul of the language, with no backwards compat beyond a suggested perl 5-compatible layer (I believe this is called 'v5').

The article touches upon a few (Grammars for instance), but I personally think the concurrency work will also be a real draw.

The other key difference is that Perl 6 is actually a specification with an official test suite and Grammar (STD). I believe the specs indicate that anything that passes the test suite can be deemed to support 'Perl 6', which really opens up the use of various backends. The Rakudo Perl 6 implementation has support for three (MoarVM, Parrot, and JVM).