Hi stevieb,

while I agree with most of your post (++), I think that this sentence:

They are as different as perl5 vs Python for example.

isn't true (or, at the very least, is a gross exaggeration). Yes Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different programming languages, but they share the same philosophy and a lot of the syntax, so they are much closer to each other than any of these two is from Python.

Despite their differences, learning Perl 6 with a Perl 5 background is very easy, while learning, say, Perl 5 with a Python background takes much more effort and even, in a way, a mental paradigm shift. I can claim that I really know what I am talking about here, since I have gone through these two processes: I was using Python (many years ago) before I took up Perl 5, and, of course, more recently I learned Perl 6.

Once I learned Perl 5, I essentially gave up coding in Python (except for some legacy code and for a few experiments with Python's new constructs), but the fact that I've learned Perl 6 doesn't mean that I have stopped using Perl 5 in any way, I'm still using Perl 5 more than Perl 6 (notably at $work).