*blink blink* Huh?!? When is disregarding another language's strengths a good thing? Or, is the idea "We can't do it, so it can't be good"? FYI - the Perl6 object system is heavily influenced by Ruby, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp. In fact, as stvn has put it, the P6 OO system is meant to take the best elements from the best-of-breed languages and meld them into something that doesn't suck.

Yes, Perl is an amazing language. By far, it's the best all-purpose language out there, with the CPAN being a major component of that. This doesn't mean that it can't be improved. If it's to be improved, one needs to find languages that do things better, then borg those features into Perl. That's what Perl has always done from the very beginning. And, that's what Perl6 is doing. Not just OO, but macros and grammars and function signatures and a lot of other things that have been seriously missed in Perl5.

Now, you may be thinking "I do perfectly fine without X in Perl." And, yes, you're right - you do perfectly fine. But, have you ever dipped into another language that didn't have hashes or regexes or lists that DWIM? In other words, have you ever written in C, Java, or Javascript^*? After working in Ruby for about a month, it's like pulling teeth to work in Perl5's OO. It feels clunky, wordy, and just plain too complicated. It literally feels like I'm back in ANSI C or Pascal. Heck, coming back to Perl5 from Ruby feels that way in nearly every sense. As a few people have put it on the Perl6 langauge list, Ruby is the closest we're getting to Perl6 until Perl6 is out.

*: Before you say that JS has hashes, it doesn't if someone changes Object.prototype anywhere at anytime, like the oft-used prototype.js library does.

When is disregarding another language's strengths a good thing?

Gee... just about anytime you aren't discussing language design or making comparisons. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, we weren't. We were talking about good ways to do things in Perl . (And, by "Perl", I mean the one people use for serious work now; not 6.)

Now, you may be thinking "I do perfectly fine without X in Perl.

You seemed to have missed the mark here. There are plenty of things from other languages that I miss in Perl. But I don't try to jerry-rig them in Perl just because they aren't there. I take the pragmatic approach, the path of least resistance, and do it the way that makes sense in the language I'm working with. (And that's a fair summary of the node to which you were replying.)

In other words, have you ever written in C, Java, or Javascript?

For the record, sure. All three. Far more in C than Java or (snort) JS. C++ too. And quite a bit of Python at one time. And some TCL. And Lisp. CLIPS. Fortran. Pascal. Basic. Various shells, of course. A tiny bit of Ada once (which, thankfully I've forgotten everything about except its god-forsaken verbosity.) And, more recently, yes: Ruby; which is, I agree, very nice indeed. (Nice enough, in fact, that by the time Perl6 come into its own, I'll probably have to be converted from Ruby.) But still, I won't be getting entirely away from Perl5 anytime soon.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";