Perl6 might be a little early yet, but you should definitely closely-study the Moose (and MooseX and Mouse) packages on CPAN. Now. You can, within the context of Perl5, do a lot of important and useful things much easier than you could do before. The overhead is very-acceptable in most cases, IMHO, and the productivity gains to you are quite substantial. It's “a better moose-trap.” ;-) (Anyway, a heck of a power-tool, not to be overlooked as I almost did.)