Hmm, interesting indeed. That are the general requirements for any pragmatic and practical language I guess.

Thats indeed true. I myself designed multiple small toy languages, just for fun and for learning how to use bison and how one could implement closures and all. But I would've never had the strength or the time to make it really usable, to round up the edges and fix the bugs and write the standard library, which is the MOST important part just right after a nice syntax.

About Perl6: I wonder whether they have a large enough user community. After I learned 2-3 years ago that Perl6 won't be usable for another 2-3 years (despite all the loud propaganda and hype), I concentrated on Perl (5) again.

About C++: There are times I get the need to write some C++ code, especially with the nice libraries provided by the boost project. But in the end I come back to Perl and write the real application there somehow. The value and flexibility of anonymous closures is just too big, and coding C++ can also be very tedious work. Adding the method in the header and then in the code file, for each callback make another function which also has to be declared correctly, and so on.
In the end I think to myself: Hey, I'm doing this for fun and in my free time, so why not use a language you can actually make more progress and be more flexible for big future changes.