Any "successor" to the wildly-successful Perl-5 must IMHO champion compatibility above all. I believe that it really must somehow be a drop-in replacement that must be guaranteed to work: instead of requiring pragmas to "turn on" backward compatibility, I think it needs to have pragmas to "turn on" forward features.

Please read the article.

"Please read the article."

This user will never read or understand the article. Lower your expectations ;)