Unfortunately, I arrived late, so I missed a lot of the things that Andy lists here. (Fortunately, I attended the OO and parsing classes that he taught. I highly recommend his classes; if you have an opportunity to take any of them, don't balk at the expense.)

Some thoughts:

• He discussed Perl Aikido: the gentle art of writing modules that helps other code to do the right thing. Because if it doesn't, it breaks.

• Concerning Perl 6 and OO: You may have heard that '->' will be replaced by '.', the dot. I really don't like the idea, primarily for readability and semantic connotations, but the fact that it comes from C++, Java and VB doesn't exactly improve my opinion of it. Anyway, Damian convinced me that a) I could (reluctantly) learn to live with it, b) not only should there be a pragma like "use syntax 'Perl 5';" but I can always write a Filter so that my own code can use arrows if I really can't live without them, c) Larry's mind is set on this one, so no whining.

• Some of the Perl 6 attribute/function names currently under consideration left a lot to be desired, although I've blanked out the memory of the worst ones. But unlike the ., these are still subject to change.

• There will be an honest-to-God switch statement in Perl 6, but probably won't use C's switch-case-break syntax, and there was some grumbling about the possible alternatives. Fallthroughs would have to be explicitly specified, which I thought would be a good thing.

• I was first put off by them, but now I'm convinced that Attributes (or Properties) will be a boon. He said to just think of them as adjectives that modify a noun (i.e. a variable or code). I'm especially looking forward to

  sub getdata : Exportable {
  
  }
  [download]

  ...which Damian said is being developed by someone who'll be putting it on CPAN RSN.

-- Frag.