Warning: Ramble ahead!

I do love my craft and I agree that Ruby has some things going for it that Perl 5 does not. However, Perl 5 is, for all intents and purposes, a much more practical language. The primary reason for that is the CPAN. In fact, it may be that the CPAN is the last main reason to stick with Perl 5. That's why we needed Perl 6. Perl 5 is old and it shows (though I must confess that I love the language and all of it's quirks :).

If we love our craft, we will grow and discover new things. If you appreciate the conciseness that can be found with rich expressivesness, you'll appreciate the direction that Perl 6 is going. Heck, even Java is beginning to realize that things need to be different. Java 1.5 has enough interesting things in the language (such as Generics and Autoboxing^*) that it might start moving in some very interesting directions. Most notably, one direction appears to be less code, which is one of the biggest complaints against the language.

In short, all languages evolve. Perl is evolving, but the direction is exciting. The new features make the language simpler without the overhead that C++ (to use your example) forces upon us. For example, to iterate over lists in parallel:

for @ids, @customers -> $id, $customer {
   ...
}
[download]

That's the sort of thing that people need to do all the time, but write buggy code to accomplish. If your complaint is that Perl 6 will be a huge language, you're right. I'm not sure how that's a complaint, though. It's still easy to learn the basics and adding little bits and pieces of the language as you go is not a Bad Thing. However, these new constructs make programs shorter and clearer. Not like C++ at all :) To really get a feel for it, though, check out Perl 6 Essentials. It's a very easy read and while it's admittedly already out of date, they will be updating it every year until Perl 6 comes out.

^* Autoboxing is nice, but I find it pretty annoying that it's a way to deal with a broken "feature" of Java rather than just fix the darned feature. Why won't Sun listen to their users? Or are their users so used to mixing primitives and objects that they don't realize there's a better way?