Is there a conspiracy to prevent Perl 5 from being made simple and robust?

Note: sorry for replying so late, but I noticed this thread only now.

Well, no conspiracy, but Perl has never been designed, thought, claimed or intended to be simple at all. I love simplicity, and I admire it in other languages. But it's not part of Perl, period. And for some reason I love Perl too. As far as robustness is concerned, I don't know: probably it has never been considered a main design objective, i.e. if compared to other charachteristics, but it has certainly been taken into account to some extent as well. Indeed the language has been designed to be practical and magic. Yet it evolved into something robust enough to be used reliably enough in production, and business, and all those other environments and situations you seem to boast about. Perl 6 is... err... well... a dream of bringing all this to another level: made even more practical, more magic, but also consistent at the same time. Well, Perl 5 happens to be a dream come true. I don't see anything that could possibly prevent Perl 6 from being another one, and I feel like giving it a chance: what I see currently happening seems to support my hope! I find your rants many orders of magnitude more annoying than the alleged "hype".

Me too. If it's any comfort, just think of the design of Perl 6 as
a genetic algorithm running on a set of distributed wetware CPUs.
We'll just keep mutating our ideas till they prove themselves adaptive.
- Larry Wall in p6l, "Re: Adding linear interpolation to an array"